Handle with care

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Stories about data privacy are rarely out of the news. Ever since The Guardian first published details of the US National Security Agency’s Prism scheme in June, there has been a steady drip-drip of new revelations about the extent to which government agencies are able to peer into the private conversations of internet users.

Add to that the outcries over lost personal data (the DVLA, for example), the frequent and often confusing changes made to social network privacy policies (Facebook in particular), and the instances where companies were found to be collecting more information than they had previously admitted to (Google’s Street View cars, for instance). It’s not hard to see why Paul Flatters thinks data privacy will be the next evolution of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda.

Flatters is a trends forecaster and a co-founder of Trajectory Partnership. Part of his job involves tracking the ever-changing concerns of consumers – and this includes their perceptions of the ...