Keeping Your Enemies Close

Keeping Your Enemies Close - New York Times: "IF you found yourself running a company suddenly branded one of the most reviled in the country — if, for example, you noticed that visitors to Consumerist.com, a heavily visited consumer Web site, voted yours as the second “worst company in America” and you had just been awarded the 2005 “Lifetime Menace Award” by the human rights group Privacy International — you might feel obliged to take extraordinary steps. You might even want to reach out to your most vocal critics and ask them, “What are we doing wrong?”

So it was in early 2005 that Douglas C. Curling, the president of ChoicePoint, a giant data broker that maintains digital dossiers on nearly every adult in the United States, courted two critics whom he had accused just months earlier of starting “yet another inaccurate, misdirected and misleading attack” on his company.