Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

In 1998, the group was able supply about 20% of a typical American household's goods and services (a database of one million items). Its plans were to supply 95% of all needs (about three million types of goods and services) by 1999. However, this ambitious blueprint suffered a major setback in 1998-99. A very old-fashioned accounting scandal provoked both the resignation of Walter Forbes as Chairman, ands precipitous loss of 80% of Cendant's stock market valuation. So it may not be Cendant itself, but yet another - still unknown company that becomes the Information Baron of the cyber world.

From Information Age to Corporate Millennium What is important about the Cendant case is that it illustrates one possible outcome of the dynamics of the cyber economy. It also graphically shows that there are questions that should be raised about the implications of concentrating information power. Market concentration has led to abuses against which anti-trust laws have proved necessary. Information concentration could similarly lead to abusive use of personal information.

Privacy at risk There are clearly important issues around privacy protection that the new technologies will create. While Cendant may have no intention to abuse its information power, accumulating an unending stream of personal data in any one hand, private or public is bound to create abuses at some point. No police state has ever been able to reconstruct individual lives at the level of detail possible through an unlimited accumulation of medical, financial and transaction data.

Employees have practically no constitutional privacy rights wherever their employer is involved (see sidebar). The cyber economy could extend that process to everybody else.