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What Do Best Buy, Rite Aid Say About Data In A Merging World?

Written by Evan Schuman
February 11th, 2009
Some four months after Best Buy dropped $121 million in mid-September 2008 to take over downloadable music pioneer Napster, both companies quietly said that Napster's privacy policy was changing to let Best Buy do a wide range of unannounced things with the newly obtained data riches. Napster's CEO, Chris Gorog, went so far as to write a blog that spoke of "personalized music pre-loaded on new MP3 players or mobile phones because of our collaboration."

Regardless of what Best Buy ends up doing, in today's rock-bottom economy, with its mergers and bankruptcies, the retail concept of data ownership is getting quite a workout. For example, CompUSA closed its doors but has now reemerged in a very different form in Florida. And there's no telling where the petabytes (exabytes?) of customer information now controlled by Circuit City will wind up. From a privacy perspective, there are even scarier possibilities than someone's music or computer purchases falling into the wrong hands.

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Posted in CRM, E-Commerce, In-Store, IT Strategy/Industry, Premium Content, Security/Fraud, Software
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