A Matter of Trust

I saw another amusing little story on the Consumerist last week that got me thinking about some of the responsibilities of running an online business, and how they differ from any similar operation in the real world. The story was about a guy whose wife started getting emails from an online florist service, addressed to him, thanking him for his gift to “Margaret” and then (in subsequent messages) asking if he wanted to send an additional gift to Margaret, or a Valentine’s Day surprise, or a Christmas gift, and so on. This rapidly deteriorated into a difficult situation for the poor fellow, since his wife’s name isn’t Margaret, and she was more than a little hacked off at the idea that he’d been buying flowers for another woman…

Now, on the face of it this just looks like a funny story; something out of an old sitcom or a bad movie. In real life, people don’t start making assumptions about infidelity (or worse things) just because one computer mailing list somewhere got an entry crossed up – or, at least, that’s the common assumption. However, it seems a bit flippant to assume that such an error couldn’t possibly cause any interpersonal difficulty for anyone anywhere in the world; or, in other words, it seems probable that while the odds of such a problem actually advancing to the point where it destroys marriages, ruins lives, and causes expensive lawsuits that will also bankrupt the company making these charming little slip-ups are relatively low, it would be irresponsible to assume that they are zero. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the online florist in this story is doing…

You can pick up the original story here if you want to. In this case, it would appear that everything has been sorted out, at least to a point; the man in our story is still married and his wife appears to have accepted that this was just a computer error. But what if it hadn’t turned out this well? We’ve already discussed the case where a well-meaning cell phone company tried to save a customer some money by merging the billing for her account with those of the rest of her family’s cell phones and wound up exploding her marriage when her husband found out about her long conversations with her lover and used that as the starting point to expose her entire affair. In that case, the woman whose affair was exposed is suing the cell phone company, and may well recover enough that the gaff will not seem funny anymore. What would have happened to the florist service if the fellow in our story really was having an affair?

My point here is that fifty years ago this sort of problem would never have occurred; the Internet didn’t exist, and while misunderstandings about purchases were still possible (there’s an episode of the Andy Griffith Show where one happens in Mayberry) there were very few companies that could plausibly destroy lives all over the world with nothing more than crappy database management. Even one generation ago this sort of thing would have been a novelty at worst, and sitcom script material most of the time. Today, anyone doing business over the Internet could make such an error on any given day, and end up causing real human suffering as well as incurring massive liability lawsuits and going bankrupt…

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating here: the new age of Internet commerce offers some amazing opportunities to everyone in the business community, but it brings will it a whole new range of potential hazards – just like any other new technology does. This time the story has a happy ending, but the next time it might not – and the next time, it might be your company in the cross-hairs. It might be worth your time to take a moment and think about that…