Big Brother may be watching you... but the CRM system's turning a blind eye

In the UK we rightly have a lot of concerns about what use data is put to. There's more information flowing around CRM systems about us than we might sometimes feel is entirely healthy - or necessary.

The gathering of data in an information age is a vital weapon, be it commercial or political. Google has been taking a brave stand in the US against the Bush administration's demands that it should hand over millions of search results so that the spooks in Washington can pore over them and see if there's any 'tehr-uhr-ist' related material among the searches for 'teenage nympho lust orgy' or 'Colin Farrel home video download'.

Sadly Google has shamefully let itself down by pandering to the regime in China by imposing censorship on its search engine in that neck of the woods. Standing up for the privacy rights of US citizens is one thing; missing out on all that lucrative money to be made in China is quite another it seems. Tanks rolling over student protestors? Oppresive regime? Censorship of information? Hey, there's principle and then there's profit!

In the UK of course we're still worried about ID Cards, although I do find it interesting that the majority of people I've spoken to about it - in scientific research arduously carried out down the pub around 10 o'clock at night when I find the political commentators tend to be at the peak of their powers! - are more concerned about having to fork out to pay for them than the principle of them.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison - and he's another one that's ready to cosy up to the Chinese government and turn a blind eye where necessary! - noted a few years ago that people already carry around ID cards in the form of credit cards. Of course he has a point. We all know that Tesco knows more about us through its loyalty cards than the Home Office is ever likely to - especially if they award the contract to a systems integrator that can be relied upon to cock it up.

But people have strange attitudes to data gathering and ID management. I have a friend in the US who rants and raves about totalitarian regimes where people have to carry ID cards around with them all the time and fails to make the connection between that and the US practice of having to produce photo ID every five minutes in the form of a drivers licence.

Tom Siebel once - most unfortunately and highly questionably - said post 9/11 that the outrages in New York could have been avoided if the US government had invested in a decent CRM system years ago. It was a spectacular PR own goal for him, but he did sort of have a point. The notion that 9/11 could have been prevented with some Siebel CRM is patent rubbish, but the potential of correctly implemented CRM-like systems to assess, gather and alert on certain types of data is immense.

As with so many technologies, the potential for good use is enormous; so too is the potential for abuse. With my cynical head on, I can't help but feel that in some respect maybe it's a good job that so many CRM systems don't work properly or can't share their data with other systems...

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Stuart Lauchlan
News & Analysis Editor
stuart.lauchlan@mycustomer.com

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