I posted yesterday about switching to Web 2.0 business applications. However, when organizations do this they should be aware of the other side of it: privacy. Boing Boing notes:

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

Again, this is where using Open Source applications is good, as if the service provider becomes abusive you can simply switch to another provider or install the application for yourself. And with DBE you can still keep in sync with your colleagues and partners.

Updated 17:15: In addition to privacy, another major concern with using Web 2.0 services is the possibility of downtimes:

The Dec. 20, 2005, outage cut many companies off from critical data for hours on a busy, pre-holiday business day. It also called into question how well Salesforce, which stores customer and sales records for thousands of businesses, is holding up under rapid growth.

“We don’t want outages and we’re doing everything we can not to have them, but we’ll occasionally have them,” he said. “That’s part of computing…nothing runs at 100 percent availability.”

Via Ditherati.