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Visit the Amazon.com site to buy a book online and your welcome page will include recommendations for other books you might enjoy, including the latest from your favorite authors, all based on your history of purchases. Most customers appreciate these suggestions, much the way they would recommendations by a local librarian. But, what if you visited an investment site, only to find advertising messages suggesting therapies for your recently diagnosed heart condition? Chances are that you would experience what Fran Maier calls the "creepiness" factor, a sense that someone has been snooping into a part of your life that should remain private. Maier is the Executive Director of TrustE, a nonprofit that sets guidelines for online privacy and awards a seal of approval to companies meeting those guidelines. She was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Creepiness Factor The creepiness factor is a risk inherent in so-called behavioral targeting. This practice is based on marketers anonymously observing a user's behavior on the Internet and compiling a personal profile based on interests and behavior -- sites visited, searches conducted, articles read, even emails written and received. Based on their profiles, users receive advertising targeted specifically to them, regardless of where they travel on the web. Consumer advocates worry that online data collection and tracking is going too far. Marketing executives counter that consumers benefit from seeing advertising relevant to their interests and contend that relinquishing some personal data is a reasonable trade-off for free access to Internet content, much of it supported by advertising.

Heartland Payment Systems, a credit card processor, may have had up to 100 million records exposed to malicious hackers. Payment processors CheckFree and RBS Worldpay, and employment site Monster.com have all reported data breaches in recent months, as have universities and government agencies. Experts at Wharton say that personal data is increasingly a liability for companies, and suggest that part of the solution may be minimizing the customer information these companies keep.

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The million-and-one ways in which the Internet can be useful, efficient and fun are well known. Its potential for abuse by pornographers, phishers, scammers and spammers has also been apparent since its early days. What has taken a bit more time to emerge, however, is awareness of the Internet's increasing threat to privacy as people become more comfortable offering information about themselves online. Faculty members at Wharton say people who access the Internet for what have become routine functions -- sending email, writing blogs, and posting photos and information about themselves on social networking sites -- do not realize how much of their personal privacy, their very identities, they put at risk. Nor do they fully comprehend the extent to which they are inviting mischief, embarrassment and harm, perhaps for decades to come, from others looking to dig up digital dirt. In addition, legal experts say that while laws already on the books provide criminal and civil remedies for some nefarious uses of personal information, the ways in which the Internet can be harnessed for questionable purposes that encroach on privacy have yet to be fully addressed by the courts.

Wharton School professor Andrea Matwyshyn has attended Defcon for the past five years. This year, her radar is pointing to corporate disclosure of computer security threats. Most consumers, she says, find out about them primarily through news reports and after-the-fact data breach notifications. Big business, Matwyshyn says, needs to do a much better job of keeping customers abreast of how they're dealing with big security threats. "Companies need to be aware that their customers are going to start asking questions about their security and what they're doing," she told Forbes.

As protests in Iran last month drew the world's attention, the top executives at a large global industrial goods company held a teleconference to consider their options. The meeting was hastily called, but the participants were not starting from scratch. In fact, the events unfolding in the country were strikingly similar to a scenario that they had developed, along with a handful others, in a 2008 offsite meeting focused on potential changes in their competitive environment. The workshop, the output, and the eventual impact on decision making represents a perfect illustration of how so-called scenario planning techniques can be utilized to help managers navigate in complex and uncertain environments. In the meeting the industrial company held last year, executives had discussed each scenario they developed, the potential triggers for each of them, and how the company should respond to each of these situations if it were to arise. Pulling out the notes from these discussions, they already knew their options and had a view on how they would like to respond. In many ways, they were prepared -- and already one step ahead of some other companies.

It was only a matter of time! Auditor accuracy being examined in lawsuit may signal change in PCI and other compliance processes.

When CardSystems Solutions was hacked in 2004 in one of the largest credit card data breaches at the time, it reached for its security auditor's report. In theory, CardSystems should have been safe. The industry's primary security standard, known then as CISP, was touted as a sure way to protect data. And CardSystems' auditor, Savvis Inc, had just given them a clean bill of health three months before. Yet, despite those assurances, 263,000 card numbers were stolen from CardSystems, and nearly 40 million were compromised. More than four years later, Savvis is being pulled into court in a novel suit that legal experts say could force increased scrutiny on largely self-regulated credit card security practices. They say the case represents an evolution in data breach litigation and raises increasingly important questions about not only the liability of companies that handle card data but also the liability of third parties that audit and certify the trustworthiness of those companies. "We're at a critical juncture where we need to decide . . . whether [network security] auditing is voluntary or will have the force of law behind it," says Andrea Matwyshyn, a law and business ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who specializes in information security issues. "For companies to be able to rely on audits . . . there needs to be mechanisms developed to hold auditors accountable for the accuracy of their audits." The case, which appears to be among the first of its kind against a security auditing firm, highlights flaws in the standards that were established by the financial industry to protect consumer bank data. It also exposes the ineffectiveness of an auditing system that was supposed to guarantee that card processors and other businesses complied with the standards. Credit card companies have touted the standards and the auditing process as evidence that financial transactions conducted under their purview are secur