Thursday, November 16, 2006

Beware the intarweb backlash

A couple of days ago, the ultra-popular blog Boing Boing posted an account of an individual who was arrested in a national bank after inquiring whether a cheque he had received was legit. (See: Boing Boing: Bank of America loses $50 million from customers upset by false arrest.) The author of the post asked readers to e-mail Boing Boing if they decided to close their accounts at the bank to protest the situation. So far, they report that the bank has lost $900,000 worth of business from the blog's readers.

While the incident doesn't really have a privacy angle, it is worth thinking about what might happen if your company were to be involved in a privacy incident that received this kind of coverage. Word of mouth has aways had a strong impact on the bottom line, but word of blog (particularly one as popular as Boing Boing) can be much more powerful.

Think about it.

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