Privacy as a Intangible Asset?

Today I was thinking about Privacy & Intangible Assets (IA).

What's Intangible Assets (IA)? Intangible assets are defined as assets that are not physical in nature.

The most common form of intangible asset for a business is goodwill. This is the customer base that the business has built up and is the principal reason that a business might sell for more than the value of the tangible assets.

And Privacy? Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to stop information about themselves from becoming known to people other than those they choose to give the information to. Privacy is sometimes related to anonymity although it is often most highly valued by people who are publicly known. Privacy can be seen as an aspect of security—one in which trade-offs between the interests of one group and another can become particularly clear.

By the way a fantastic article about Privacy in Wikipedia.

So if brands, patents, IP law are IA why not Privacy?

In this article published in New Straits Times on September 16, 2003

Important for companies to protect digital assets

There are three types of digital assets in a typical enterprise or organisation:

- Data (for example, customer information, equity and market index data online and other proprietary data);
- Applications or software which run corporate IT systems and its workflow (for example, an enterprise resource planning software); and
- Intellectual property rights that are in digitised form (for example, copyrights in e-books, movies, musical recordings or trade secrets which are in a stored in a digital format).

RISK EXPOSURES

Digital assets of most enterprises are exposed to a wide range of risks and these include:

- Security intrusions
- Piracy of digital assets
- Improper use of proprietary content.
- Invasion of privacy in contravention of privacy laws.

Another interesting article about Knowledge Management and Privacy.

Privacy and Security: a challenge for KM
published in Knowledge Board.

The problem of protecting data and documents from being corrupted or stolen has become critical for many companies and organisations due to the great spread of the Internet and Internet-related networks, and the huge amounts of information that is continuously shared and exchanged over them. In this sense, important knowledge assets (data, intellectual property, hardware and software systems, documents etc.) must be protected from external and internal violations to avoid unexpected loss of data or unauthorised access.

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Privacy

Privacy is an important issue (above all) for email services offered by free providers (e.g. Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, MSN and now also Google). These services use automated text scanning to detect virii and spam. Google is also now offering its indexing service to facilitate and fasten information retrievals.

The amount of personal data that can be gather from e-mails is so significant that some providers use them to send targeted advertisements or to personalise services. For this reason many users complain about it, while at the same time asking for faster search engines and for more storage space to keep their mail.

Another problem not only users, but also software houses have to face is 'Spyware' and its variant 'Adware'. Spywares are programs that hide themselves in users’ computers and start taking up computer resources or stealing information including visited websites, email addresses and even credit card numbers. Adwares are less malicious. Their main goal is to advertise, so they work by randomly popping-up browser windows, changing homepages, adding search bars and other irritating but not critical actions.