Due to these concerns and the ethicacy of industrial espionage was closely evaluated through the early 1990s by the U.S. Congress and the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was passed to protect the rights of corporations to keep their trade secrets, confidential details about customers, pricing, and supply chain specifics protected (Richardson, Luchsinger, 2007). This has also had a significant effect on the types of advanced analytics software applications companies can use to monitor their competitors online, the use of competitive intelligence gathering practices that are potentially unethical including the purchasing of customer lists and advanced customer data from online services when the company has not released it for use in the public domain (Richardson, Luchsinger, 2007). The ethics of customer monitoring are today leaning more towards using publically available data on the Internet and in print. Using advanced analytics software it is also possible to interpolate which consumers are purchasing which products, and then using marketing automation strategies, seek to sell to them. This is also ethical. The deliberate purchasing or stealing of customer data however is not and results in fines to companies that pursue these unethical activates in violation of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (Richardson, Luchsinger, 2007).
Conclusion
From the context of whether the customers are consumers or businesses the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 applies equally to both. Yet the systems developed to track competitors' customers through CRM systems vary significantly between them being business or consumers (Fleisher, Wright, Allard, 2008). As there...
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