Jobs of the Future: Personal Privacy Manager

This Christmas, you may have given out more than presents; you may have unwittingly given away your privacy. Whether you shopped online or got in line at the mall, it seems that this year's desperate retailers turned a particularly nasty corner on the practice of collecting, repackaging and sharing your personal information every time you made a purchase. According to a breaking news items about Sears and KMart (and many others assuredly) the clandestine practice of using spyware to make your life more transparent hit a high point this holiday season. With the Net impetus to share information, I guess this should be an expected cost of modern life.

What to do? My bet: we will soon need to hire, along with a tax preparer and a Geek Squad cadet, a Personal Privacy manager to scrub our public lives and develop everyday practices to insulate us from prying eyes. If you know of anyone who is already in the business, let me know and we'll pass the tip on. That way, unless Facebook sends out a Beacon on our purchases, it may still be possible to be a secret Santa next year.