Individuals often surrender private information for various online services. Ethical business practice would be to protect this information, which may lead to the loss of secrecy, anonymity, and solitude.

Moreover, data warehouses now collect and store enormous amounts of personal and consumer transactions data. Preserving large volumes of consumer and business information is possible for an indefinite amount of time. Erosion of privacy can be done with these databases, cookies and spyware.

There is a viewpoint that data warehouses are meant to stand-alone and need to be protected. However, personal information can be collected from corporate websites and social networking sites to initiate a malicious reverse lookup. Therefore, how public domains should use information is an ethical debate.