Do Tech Companies Protect Your (And Your Clients') Privacy?

At one point or another, when meeting with a REALTOR® about marketing, the conversation about technology comes up. It comes up for two reasons. First off, technology and marketing go hand-in-hand in today's very technical marketplace. Secondly though, people always have feelings about what companies are great and what ones should be avoided.

For instance, our cloud-based real estate CRM solution syncs your calendar, tasks and contacts. The two most common ways to do that are through Outlook (installed on your computer), or with Gmail (a cloud service that hosts your data for you). While many agents are more than happy to have Gmail take care of this for them, a good number of you express to me your concerns that "big brother" shouldn't have access to everything about you, your interactions with your clients, and your other personal data.

So how do you know who is protecting you and who isn't? Luckily, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has your interests in mind, with their annual Who Has Your Back? Reporting.

The idea behind this report is to give the companies incentive for transparency regarding how your data is disseminated to government agencies. It also is meant to encourage them to ratchet up protection for their users, ensuring that data is safe from potential privacy gaps. According to Gizmodo, the data on each company was based on six criteria:

1. Require a warrant for content of communications
2. Tell users about government data requests
3. Publish transparency reports
4. Publish law enforcement guidelines
5. Fight for users' privacy rights in courts
6. Fight for users' privacy in Congress

And the findings you ask? It might surprise you:

This is a very interesting infographic. It is most interesting to me because many of the companies I hear clients complain about actually go the farthest to protect their users, and vice versa.

For instance, as mentioned, many of you have problems with Google. Additionally, I hear concerns about companies like Dropbox, and LinkedIn (mostly based on their recent cyber attack). Yet, they actually have scored pretty high scores in this report.

Other companies, such as Verizon and Facebook, which many of you choose over other competitors, in reality rate the lowest in these categories.

Can you draw a direct line between a company's privacy policies and their ability to keep your data secure? While not a direct line, it could be suggested that today's marketplace is changing rapidly. If a company is on the leading edge of new policies, the culture of the company is most likely one that quickly adopts new technologies and strategies across the board (including security).

Whether or not you are concerned about your online privacy rights, it definitely is interesting to see who has your back and who doesn't.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.