The other day this creepy guy from Rogers came into the store with one of those god-awful mobile phone/camera dealies. He started walking around the store, inconspicuously snapping pictures of displays and shelves inside our establishment. I caught on immediately and both of us staff watched him closely to see what he was up to. He didn't seem like he was trying to do anything shifty other than the fact that he was being shifty about taking pictures.

Somehow, this event made me uneasy and has been bothering me over the last few days. I did a bit of thinking as to why this would bother me so and I came to realize that I value privacy-even of the corporate kind. It's not cool for someone to come into my house and take pictures of things I don't want photographed. Likewise, it's also not cool for someone to walk into my store and take snapshots without the permission of a qualified employee.

Delving a little deeper into my professional ethics courses, I thought about privacy rights and how refusing access to certain information can give the impression that a company has something to hide. My thought of the day hit me right at that moment: every company has something to hide.

It's a funny thought, really. People get huffy when they hear about a company that has cut some legal corner to save money. People get huffy when they think about a company acting in what they perceive to be an unethical manner. When it comes to capitalist corporations, people are just generally huffy.

Of course, companies have varying degrees of skeletons in their closets. Most are small potatoes - a human resources mishap or a few minor legalities ignored in order increase convenience. However, there are a few cases that are just too huge to let out of the bag.

For example, a large American corporation (who shall remain nameless) manufactured and installed a number of counting machines for the German government in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Unbeknownst to them, the machines would later be used to keep track of the millions of prisoners in Hitler's concentration camps. This information leaked out many years later and put the company in a tight spot. Of course, they apologized for any harm their technologies might have caused and did the best to cleanse the company's tarnished image. They did a pretty good job; most people have either forgotten or have never even heard the news.

Another fun example of companies needing to mask information comes from the recording industry. Record labels are often owned by larger corporations. In fact, there are four huge corporations that I can think of off the top of my head that own the lion's share of labels in America. The funny thing is what you can associate to these companies through mergers and joint ventures with various other entities. It's complicated, but each of those four companies has a relatively close tie to the U.S. military and the companies who manufacture the weapons that they use. So you could infer that artists like Nickelback and Avril Lavinge help to fund the production of combat simulators, mission planning systems, shock/vibration isolators, head-mounted display systems, and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Those are just two examples of how corporations need to retain privacy in order to keep their public image favourable. In fact, I'm all for it. The population is better off without knowing these things. The economy, the way of life, and the sanity of the people demands censorship from certain things.

Frankly, I'm quite content for the world to be run behind the scenes by these huge corporations. This is to say that I would feel rather uncomfortable if the power was put in the hands of the people. I'd rather have my eyes blindfolded and be led around in relative safety than join a mindless, wild herd of sheep on an "enlightened" path of self-destruction.

So for the guy taking pictures in my store: Stop it. What are you trying to do, start a revolution?

- Colin (invincibleironman@hotmail.com)