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Sears’ Online Customer Privacy
By Reshma Kumar at January 05, 2008 0 CommentsSears came under a lot of criticism recently for disclosing users’ purchases to the public.
Here’s how it works:
1) From the Sears “Manage My Home” site, www.managemyhome.com, create an account and sign in.
2) On the Home menu, choose “Home Profile”. In the Search Purchase History section, choose “Find Your Products”.
3) Enter the name, phone number, and street address of the customer whose purchases you wish to view. Click “Find Products”.
And voila! Sears then displays all purchases for the specific customer.
Assistant Professor, Benjamin Edelman, at the Harvard Business School, wrote extensively about this. The company is being accused of violating its privacy policy by failing to protect customers’ data by not notifying users exactly what happens when they download the company’s marketing software. Their Terms of Use does not disclose what info users may access and doesn’t ask users to accept its terms.
And given the invasive nature of the product, Sears has an obligation to make its behavior clearer to users. “The software is not something you’d want on your computer or the computer of anyone you care about,” Edelman said in an interview. “It tracks every site you go to, every search you make, every product you buy, and every product you look at but don’t buy. It’s just spooky.”
This is akin to the recent Facebook beacon fiasco. Sears has since disabled this search feature. Attempts to retrieve a purchase history now yield the message “We’re sorry, this feature is currently disabled.”
Labels: Facebook, online security, Privacy
