2. Lotus Development Corporation launched its Marketplace product in 1990. The product was a marketing database of 120 million U.S. consumers, with demographic information based on publicly available information. Each consumer had personal information, such as name and mailing address. But the value proposition for the product was in the fact that it combined several publicly available databases, and the result was a database that made assumptions about lifestyle, income, family and marital status, and several other demographic categories. It was intended to give companies a comprehensive database of individual spending habits for direct-mail marketing using otherwise unthreatening databases. A grassroots outcry on the Internet resulted in over 30,000 letters and phone calls from individuals who wanted their names deleted from the product. The negative press Lotus received, combined with the flood of letters from consumers who were concerned about invasion of privacy, caused Lotus to cancel the project. In this case, the resulting database showed patterns of spending and placed consumers into categories that reflected personal data the consumers felt was private.

But many organizations these days collect individual information, including your credit card provider, your bank, your creditors, and virtually any retail store in which you use a credit card or other identifying customer number. Who owns the information that is collected? Do you, the person who initially provided information to the collector? Or the collecting organization that spent the resources to save the information in the first place?