THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

In 1998, the group was able supply about 20% of a typical American
household's goods and services (a database of one million items). Its
plans were to supply 95% of all needs (about three million types of
goods and services) by 1999. However, this ambitious blueprint
suffered a major setback in 1998-99. A very old-fashioned accounting
scandal provoked both the resignation of Walter Forbes as Chairman,
ands precipitous loss of 80% of Cendant's stock market valuation. So
it may not be Cendant itself, but yet another - still unknown company
that becomes the Information Baron of the cyber world.
From Information Age to Corporate Millennium
What is important about the Cendant case is that it illustrates one
possible outcome of the dynamics of the cyber economy. It also
graphically shows that there are questions that should be raised
about the implications of concentrating information power. Market
concentration has led to abuses against which anti-trust laws have
proved necessary. Information concentration could similarly lead to
abusive use of personal information.
Privacy at risk
There are clearly important issues around privacy protection that
the new technologies will create. While Cendant may have no
intention to abuse its information power, accumulating an unending
stream of personal data in any one hand, private or public is bound
to create abuses at some point. No police state has ever been able to
reconstruct individual lives at the level of detail possible through an
unlimited accumulation of medical, financial and transaction data.
Employees have practically no constitutional privacy rights wherever
their employer is involved (see sidebar). The cyber economy could
extend that process to everybody else.