Just last week, Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD) was under fire for installing spyware on anyone's computer who signed up for Sears' MySHCcommunity.com, which is the company's 'community program', but Sears' wrongdoing was not over yet. On Thursday, a Computer Associates (NYSE: CA) analyst, Steve Berteau reported that Sears' ManageMyHome.com website stored and displayed the shopping history of customers based on a simple name or address search.
Steven Berteau searched for his parents' names on Sears' ManageMyHome.com website. The results that were returned to him were unsettling to say the least. Berteau received , "a list of their major Sears purchases running back almost two decades to when they first moved into that house." That's a big problem.
While Sears has disabled the search feature that yields such private and expansive results on ManageMyHome.com, the same cannot be said of the spyware feature on Sears' MySHCcommunity.com site.
The spyware Sears downloads on users' PCs from MySHCcommunity.com is not clearly disclosed to users. It tracks everything users do on their computers including email and bank logins. To make matters worse, Sears uploads all of the private data it collects through its spyware to third party websites thereby putting all of that personal information at further risk.
While I'm sure Sears isn't the only company tracking customers to this level and doing so fairly covertly, they are one of the few companies to get caught so far. I'm all for tracking customer behavior, but where should a company draw the line? It certainly seems Sears crossed that line, wherever it should be drawn.
I'm actually surprised that Sears didn't weigh the benefits vs. risks of their spyware program in greater detail. It's already being suggested that Sears could be in violation of FTC regulations and various compliance standards like Sarbanes-Oxley. I wonder where Sears' compliance department was in the planning meetings for this marketing program. How could anyone have thought this level of customer tracking is acceptable?
What do you think? Where should the line be drawn in terms of tracking the online behaviors of consumers? Let's face it, no one reads the terms and conditions or other legal statements when they sign up for a website, and apparently, Sears' disclosure of their spyware on MySHCcommunity.com was fairly lean. Should this (and other online customer behavior tracking) be treated as a 'buyer beware' or should companies be more ethical in their behavior tracking methodologies?
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