An article in Salon posits that privacy represents a new battleground in the marketing and PR wars amongst tech firms. By way of example, take a squabble over Square’s recent announcement that it was releasing a suite of analytics tools for small businesses to use to analyze the purchasing habits of their customers. This prompted an email to Salon’s Andrew Leonard from the press person at rival point-of-sale processor Shopkeep: “Square is more interested in collecting and selling data than it is in helping small businesses to grow,” he claimed and proceeded to fire off accusations against Square that Square promptly denied. Leonard surmises, “we may end up deciding whom we choose for our services based on whether we trust them as responsible safekeepers of our data.”
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