Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

I don't have an informed opinion on this, but let's take a wait-and-see attitude. It very well could be poor training on the company's part. Offshore development is not a panacea, it's just a tool. Although it is fascinating that these two cases would both happen in India so close together. Is the world giving much more attention to India than, say, call centers in the Far East? Are Indian companies being set up for bad PR by special interest groups?

Keeping your personal information private is getting harder and harder. My guess is that eventually we'll go to a biometrics-only system: retina-scan and/or fingerprint scan to make any financial transactions. But even then, part of that system will have to be hard-wired into the computer's motherboard and made tamper-proof. It'll be neat to watch this larger story develop over the next few years.

For now, companies involved in staffing are going to have to make double-sure that their people are trained on privacy issues. Even more discomforting than the idea that this guys purposely was selling private information is the idea that he could have been doing and not know it was wrong. Now THAT'S scary.