Consumer information is currency. And businesses that collect, mint and trade this information have done so thus far with relative impunity. "The key to privacy protection is enforcement. Right now, there's no financial harm for not having or following a privacy . . .
Consumer information is currency. And businesses that collect, mint and trade this information have done so thus far with relative impunity. "The key to privacy protection is enforcement. Right now, there's no financial harm for not having or following a privacy policy," says Andrew Shen, an analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy and free-speech advocacy firm in Washington.

Starting in 1998 with the GeoCities case in which the company was charged with violating its own privacy policy by sharing customer data, companies investigated for surreptitiously collecting personal information and reselling it to third-party marketers have received little more than federal chastisements warning them to clean up their acts. Credit card files stolen from merchant databases have yielded no charges for faulty security. And spam is still everywhere.

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