Research Plan

I’m using a variety of articles from magazines and newspapers in order to bring to the publics’ attention some of the ways in which competing businesses throughout the world try to “steal” their competitors’ confidential information. The articles that I have used in my research all contain different statistics and recent incidents from all over the world. Some of the articles I have reviewed consist of legal actions that competing companies act upon even though they are extremely unethical.

Problem:
• Companies tailing competitor employees
o Companies hire secret people to dig through some employees trash cans outside of their homes in order to get customer lists, policies, benefits, etc. about their competition.
 Source: “Snoops” Business Week from October 9, 2006
• Making phone calls and expressing a false identity
o Companies make phone calls to employees or customers of their competition to try to squeezing some useful information out of them.
• Reading through e-mails or other confidential documents and/or employees taking this information with them
o In some cases, past employees take very confidential and important information with them when they leave one job for another job in the same field.
 Source: 45% of Employees Take Data When They Change Jobs www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_200705/ai_n19162742/print
o An instance at Yale University where an associate dean and director of admissions, Stephen LeMenager, was accessing confidential Internet records to see whether its rival had admitted or rejected students who had applied to both schools.
 Source: Ivy imbroglio: Princeton Admits It Spied on Yale Admissions Site

• Filtering organizations or businesses
• Video taping workers without their permission
o Recently cell phones with camera capabilities are becoming a problem and being banned from some places of work for protective reasons.
 Source: “The dim view of camera phones” in the Indianapolis Star on August 15, 2004
Solution:
• Inform as many people as possible about the risk within competing businesses
• Warn people about some of the things companies might try to pull on them in order to get important information from them, in sneaky ways
• In order to stop “spies” from finding any useful information in employees or company trash every company should have a policy where they have to shred everything before it leaves the building
o Also, delete all information from computers once it’s no longer needed
• Monitor all employee interactions with other businesses whether a competing company or a vendor
o Keep good records of all employees’ computers and emails


I have researched this topic thoroughly because I want to make myself more aware of the lengths that people will go to in order to ‘beat out’ the competition. Also, want to make other people aware of these tactics in case they haven’t heard of any of the cases I have presented.