One of the most important things in business is to protect your company's information from competitors and personal information of employees, vendors and executives from Identity Theft and yet Franchisors are required to put personal information in the UFOC Uniform Franchise Offering Circulars. It is a catch 22 for Business Executive Management, on one hand you must follow the rules and on another hand you are being set up for Identity Theft.

What is the answer? Well the answer is to be very careful who you disclose this information too. Although realize that there are now UFOC resellers and government agencies which give this data out online? Ridiculous indeed, on one hand we are to protect the consumer by giving out disclosure documents and then on the other hand we are to protect the consumer, employees and in this case franchisees from Identity Theft?

Personally I do not think ANY franchisees names or phone numbers should be listed due to Identity Theft anyway. Those names and addresses are also used by telemarketers, email SPAMMERS, lawyers trying to fish for class action lawsuits and competition uses them too. I have looked up the names and addresses of ALL my competitors who were franchises to find out where they were and shop them and I know for a FACT they did it to me too. Indeed that is why I used that data, because they used it to attack me. Ah the dilemmas of business management, so consider this in 2006.