Combing through the fine print to find out what happens to a customer's information after they close accounts is the only way to find peace of mind Chris wrote with some concerns about his bank’s privacy policy. “I recently received the yearly privacy policy from my bank, Sovereign Bank,” he explains. “As I looked it over, one section really got my attention. It read, ‘The types of personal information we collect and share depend on the product or service you have with us. This information can include Social Security number and income, account balances and payment history, credit history, and credit scores. When you close your account, we continue to share information about you according to our policies.'”Chris asks, “Are they saying that even if I decided to close my account, they will still share my information with those companies? So this means that if I close my account today and they change their policy to post my information online for all to see, I have no recourse. Can this be true? Can this be legal?”[ Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld’s special report. ] That is a worrying statement. I doubted, though, that it could be an accurate description of the bank’s intention, despite the phrasing, so I forwarded Chris’ letter to Andrew Gully, senior vice president and managing director of corporate affairs at Sovereign Bank. “As a financial institution,” he explains, “Sovereign Bank is governed by a multitude of federal and state statutes and regulations which prohibit inappropriate sharing of customer information. When we say in our privacy policy that we will continue to share customer information, we mean that we will honor our customers’ preferences and continue to provide them every protection available to us for as long as their information is in our system.”Chris can stipulate his preferences on the bank’s Web site here. If he is concerned about sharing bank sharing information with affiliates, he should choose “Do not share my information between affiliates for marketing purposes.” That would mean that the bank will not share his information with marketing partners, whether the account is open or closed. Agrees, Gully, “If a customer had stated a ‘do not solicit’ preference with us, it would be honored even though the account has been closed. That is our policy.”The bank does retain information, though, after a customer closes an account. “We do so in order to comply with a variety of federal regulations,” explains Gully. “We are required by the Internal Revenue Code to send a Form 1099 for the interest that customer has earned for the tax year. We also retain — for a period of 7 years — copies of all checks the customer has written as well as copies of statements that we sent to the customer.” Gully went on to assure Chris that “The specter of the bank changing its privacy policy to permit it to post customer information ‘online for all to see’ is simply false. Federal statutes and numerous state statutes quite emphatically prohibit the sharing of customer information beyond narrowly drawn exceptions. Needless to say, publicly posting customer information is not one of those exceptions. The trust of our customers is one of Sovereign’s greatest assets, and we protect it to the very best of our abilities.” Technology Industry