If you can stand one more AOL story, click through to this article from today’s New York Times. It illustrates a crucial point about AOL’s recent privacy screw up in particular and online privacy in general:

Even though it can be claimed that there’s no personally identifiable information there (the AOL user name was replaced by an anonymous code number), it’s what that anonymous user does that, with a minimum of sleuthing, can quickly point to a specific individual.

Yep: scary.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re dealing with online privacy issues, there’s no such thing as erring on the side of caution. An overabundance of caution should be your norm.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.