The legal team, predictably, stuck to the letter of the law. It was their belief that the newspaper need not take any action, since the contract gives the customer no rights to her data, and no such rights are implied. Their position was that the operative legal contract protects the newspaper company from such requests. Three cheers for the legal team for such a textbook display of thinking inside the box.

Neither the corporate affairs team nor the marketing team was happy with the legal team's analysis. The marketing team thickened the plot of this scenario by revealing that this customer is a U.S. senator from the state with the newspaper company's most profitable customer base and that her husband is the founder of a megachurch near the state capital that has more than 1 million members. Both of these teams favored going beyond what was legally required to try to satisfy the ex-customer's request.

As for IT's perspective, the technical team reporting to the CIO wasn't convinced that it could guarantee eradication of any and all traces of the customer, given the disjointed state of the company's customer data systems.

If you were the CIO, what would you suggest? If you were the CEO, what would you want your CIO to tell you? As a citizen in an increasingly information-rich world, what do you think is the right thing to do?

Please send me your response and I will e-mail you the aggregate consensus of the readership.