Using Jigsaw

Jigsaw.com allows you to purchase and trade business card data. I used one of my 'free purchases' -- to f ind Craig Galati's email address -- but won't be posting any of my own contacts' business cards here.

I wanted to send an email to Craig Galati telling him about the previous blog posting, but didn't have his email address -- a web search took me to the Jigsaw.com site where, indeed, his business card data is posted.

Of course these resources can be abused. I would be reluctant to 'trade' my business cards for such a database. What about privacy? (Intriguingly, however, under Canadian privacy legislation, business card data is not considered protected information -- you can use it freely without breaching some pretty stringent privacy management regulations.) The bigger issue, however, to me is whether your decision to share or sell this information on a public database without the informed consent of the person from where it originates is respectful of your relationship with that person.

But in this case I feel no guilt about using the resources to contact Galati. I could easily enough connect with him through other networking channels -- in fact I learned his name and blog through a document temporarily marked 'confidential' -- or phone his office. Here, the web-based resource simply speeds up something that would rightfully happen anyways.