Privacy Questions Could Scuttle Barnes & Noble's Plan to Buy Borders

Starting in 2005, Borders began amassing a database of more than 48 million email addresses of customers who participated in its loyalty program. Now that the company is in bankruptcy, that email database is seen as valuable property by Barnes & Noble, which won an auction to purchase Borders’ assets for $13.9 million. The problem for Barnes & Noble is that Borders originally promised many of the customers in its loyalty program that it wouldn't disclose their personal information without their permission. Borders changed its policy in May 2008, but collected millions of email addresses and other data before then.