Sears Online Customer Privacy

Summary

This article talks about Sears’ violation of their customer privacy resulting in them receiving a lot of backlash from the public. An assistant professor has also expressed his opinion on this matter.

Recently, Sears was severely condemned for revealing the purchases of the users (without their consent) to the public.

Here’s how it works:

These are the steps through which anyone can see the purchases made by other users from Sears.

1) From www.managemyhome.com (Sears’ “Manage My Home” website), register an online account and then sign in using your credentials.

2) Select “Home Profile” from the home menu. Next, select “Find Your Products” in the section of Search Purchase History.

3) Put in the customer’s name (who purchases you desire to check out), address of the street (where the customer lives) and his/her phone number. After putting in all the details, click on “Find Products”.

Bingo! As soon as you click “Find Products”, Sears promptly shows all of the purchases for that particular customer you searched for.

Mr. Benjamin Edelman, an Assistant Professor who teaches at the Harvard Business School, wrote on the matter in detail to express his opinion. People are blaming and pointing fingers at the organization. This is because the company blatantly violated its privacy policy by not being able to safeguard the data of the customers by not letting the users know what exactly goes down when they download the marketing software of the company. The Terms of Use on their website does not reveal what precise information the users might access. Moreover, the company does not ask users to accept the terms it has laid out.

Sears is obligated to make its behavior as transparent as possible to all of the users owing to the product’s invasive nature.

In an interview, Benjamin Edelman said, “the software is not something you’d want on your computer or the computer of anyone you care about’. He also went on to say “It tracks every site you go to, every search you make, every product you buy, and every product you look at but don’t buy. It’s just spooky.”

This matter is very much similar to the fairly recent Facebook beacon debacle. Sears has disabled the above-mentioned search feature ever since it came under fire. Now, if you try to look up a purchase history, the message “We’re sorry, this feature is currently disabled” pops up.

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