How private do you expect your personal contact information to be?

Consider the following scenario: A mutual friend tells us that we should get together for lunch because we share an interest in, say, corporate training. We have a great conversation, and at the end of lunch exchange business cards with the plans to stay in touch. I return to my office and immediately sell your contact information to a Website that gets combed over by sales and marketing professionals. Do you feel betrayed?

One of my favorite business writers over at the San Francisco Chronicle, Dan Fost, called me last week to get my take on the company that rewards people to do that very thing. You can read his more exhaustive story at sfgate.com. But here's the short take.

Jigsaw Data Corp is an online marketplace where individuals can obtain fresh and accurate business contact information. Members of Jigsaw are invited to provide business contacts, and then Jigsaw assembles them for the benefit of its community.

To become a member people have two choices: Pay $25 a month or add 25 contacts per month. Adding contacts, correcting their information, or referring to others gives you points that later you can use to purchase any contacts from Jigsaw's database. Members also have the option of selling the points for money.

Jigsaw's goal is to map every business organization on the planet, contact by contact, and keep them current through a collaborative effort. They claim that its resulting database will help business people perform their jobs more efficiently and strategically. Jigsaw currently has 105,000 members, and only 131 of them sell points. Almost all trade data to get data.

I sure don't want to collaborate with a person that betrayed somebody else to get my information. Moreover, if someone takes data off one of my business cards or from the signature attached to an e-mail I send - two common methods that Jigsaw encourages - then I would feel like there had been a real violation of trust.

Even though Jigsaw stands on weak ethical ground, the company is thriving and raking in investment dollars. It has received $18 million from venture capital firms El Dorado Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Austin Ventures; has a database of 3 million contacts at 150,000 companies; and the company expects to grow to 5 million contacts by the end of the year. This interest in Jigsaw has a lot to do with the fact that the market for business information totals $3.5 billion - according to Outsell Inc. a Burlingame research firm that analyzes the industry.

The activities that Jigsaw encourages to its constituency makes me question if the trust that we expect from one another is an implicit agreement or fictional. Call it courtesy or unspoken rules, but not every relationship exchange should require a written contract.

Jigsaw claims that individuals should have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their business cards. But why not? If I want to be contacted to do business, then I will put my own information on a Website. I also reserve the right to give my business card to those whom I choose.

I do not even view Jigsaw as a great business tool. Maybe it's more accurate to say that it has potential for those individuals who do not have good connections. It's a nightmare for senior managers of big companies. For instance, I can imagine anti-globalization activists could make very good use of the site.

If I decide to give an individual my contact data, it's not the same thing as broadcasting it to the entire world. In a Jigsaw world, we are going to start putting a copyright or a privacy statement on our business cards: "I explicitly copyright this information." We very well may head in that direction soon.