Understanding their membership and membership trends is essential to any membership organisation.  Active usage of netBiog by the membership of an organisation presents the prospect of an invaluable source of information, not only about the professional development of members but also relating to the relationships and networks of individuals within the membership. 

This exciting prospect and potential to play 'big brother' must be balanced with the requirements of data protection legislation and the fundamental privacy of the individual.  As such we apply two approaches to this problem: 

1. When an individual gains access to a profile or set of profiles, they enter into an agreement about how the data from that profile may be used.  At one extreme, this could be that the data will not be released to the sponsor organisation in any form.  Another extreme would be to say that any employee or member of the organisation will have open access to the profile. 
2. By default, individual profile data remains under the control of the individual; only they can choose to disclose the content of their profile to another person.  The sponsoring organisation can have access to aggregated data; for example, the percentage of individuals who have started the profile and not yet completed it.