BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: More and more dot-com companies are falling on hard times these days, and that's leading to even more serious privacy questions: What, exactly, happens to the customers of a fallen dot-com enterprise and the personal information they provide? Here with more on that is CNN's Rusty Dornin.</s>RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What's left when a dot-com company goes under? The answer is, all to often, not much.</s>WILLIAM WEINTRAUB, BANKRUPTCY ATTORNEY: The physical assets would be the office furniture and would be, really, the Wed space, the Web site, the domain name, the customer list and the employees.</s>DORNIN: On that laundry list, there's only one that most potential buyers really want.</s>AL GREENE, CEO, HEALTHCENTRAL.COM: The key value that many of them have is in their customer list. They have spent a huge amount of dollars branding and marketing and advertising in an effort to attract a customer list.</s>DORNIN: Al Greene at healthcentral.com knows. His company just got a list of several hundred thousand customers when it bought the bulk of the assets of more.com, an on-line drug store that recently floundered. Greene says buying that list, complete with product preferences and health information, meant consumers didn't lose their supplier when more.com went out of business. Healthcentral.com says it will strictly honor more.com's privacy policy. The states attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission have already intervened to stop the sale of customer lists in some cases and federal legislation is in the works to remove customer lists from bankruptcy sales, a move privacy advocates applaud, but creditors say it could yank what little chance they have or redeeming their investment from cyberspace. Rusty Dornin, CNN, San Francisco.
When Dot-Coms Go Belly-Up, Personal Information Goes on Sale