Privacy: get it right or fail
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Businesses face a risk when using customers' personal data, as those whose privacy credentials don't convince their customers will lose those customers.
Scott Shipman, eBay's global privacy leader, believes it's not so much a matter of complying with the myriad different privacy regimes, ranging from the strict European directives at one end to the more business-friendly US system at the other.
"The laws in some ways are much less important than [the] expectations of our consumers, our customers," he said.
Shipman is sceptical of the idea that young people don't care about their privacy, and that, as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg might put it, privacy is dead.
"There are different expectations and different behaviours in each of the generations, and, over time, when you go as far back as you can go in history ... expectations of privacy and behaviour in relation to those change. They go up and they go down," he said.
On this week's Patch Monday podcast, you'll hear a wide-ranging conversation with Shipman, covering online reputation and trust, data breach-notification laws, the behavioural targeting of advertising, eBay's AdChoice technology for controlling that targeting and some of the clever things you can do by data mining eBay's sales data.
You'll even hear how you might create the online equivalent of an untraceable cash transaction.
Patch Monday also includes my usual look at some of last week's news headlines.
To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian, or phone (02) 8011 3733.
Running time: 38 minutes, 45 seconds