Privacy and Security as Allies

This article from the CSO blog examines how the concerns of the Chief Security Officer merges with those of the Chief Privacy Officer. An excerpt:

Consider for a moment Sandy Hughes, the global privacy executive for the consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. Hughes is spending a lot of her time these days talking about radio frequency ID tags, or RFIDs. That's no surprise, since there's no more contentious topic in privacy circles right now than the uses and possible misuses of these inventory tracking devices. Hughes's goal, however, isn't to determine whether Procter & Gamble should use RFIDs. It's to find the right way for P&G to use RFIDs.

Part of that involves reassuring the public. "Nobody yet that I'm aware of is planning any widespread use of these tags on any consumer products, but still you see the concern about [companies doing things like] tracking consumers by satellite," says Hughes, who's involved with EPCglobal, a nonprofit industry association developing standards for the use of RFIDs for electronic product codes. "That's not even in the plan, but [customers are] concerned about it. And because they're concerned about it, we have to address it."

"Procter & Gamble has to move forward for competitive reasons and implement RFIDs," explains Stephanie Perrin, a senior fellow for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a watchdog group. "If Sandy Hughes says, 'We're not ready for this RFID thing,' that's going to get nowhere with the board."

Hughes's mission, then? To help her company formulate a business strategy that takes those concerns into account.