Just as it's unwise to advocate clubbing baby seals or injecting cute puppies with Drano, sane people everywhere have to be in favor of privacy. It's a no-brainer, right? Privacy good.
Well, I reserve the right to cry cynicism whenever companies hide behind "privacy concerns" to duck reasonable questions. Take a look at this Times story. It chronicles the dubious decisions of U.S. Airways and United to erase all frequent-flyer miles of customers whom the airlines suspect of somehow having bent the rules. The article details the cases of two of these customers, who are eager to have the apparent injustice exposed. No matter. The airlines, for their part, simply start the most convenient of smokescreens: "We can't comment on the specifics because we respect our passengers' privacy." It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Never mind, apparently, that the passengers in question want their cases to be wide open to press scrutiny.
I've been seeing more and more of this. Citing privacy concerns allows companies to put a friendly facade on what's really a troubling lack of accountability. The best thing journalists can do in cases like these, it seems to me, is to obtain a signed and notarized privacy waiver from the consumer whose case they're looking into, and send it to the company. Let's see the corporate PR department stammer its way out of that one.
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