Yes, because who wouldn't want to use the services of an appraiser who is going to sell your company's most sensitive financial information to third parties?
I for one refuse to work with an accountant who refuses to sell my tax returns on Scribd.
The issue is someone could conceivably sell the information without your knowledge, or create aggregated data products from that information which aren't so clearly "your information", like "this is where you are compared to your industry as a whole, based on deals we've seen" (which is probably ok).
Because of this, there needs to either be a regulatory control to prevent it, or serious effort from the valuator to convince customers their data is being handled safely.
So I shouldn't use sarcasm because some people don't care for it?
> Because of this, there needs to either be a regulatory control to prevent it...
Do you know if appraisers are considered fiduciaries? Do you know if any of the societies appraisers commonly belong to have codes of ethics that would prevent the use of client data in any of the ways you describe? I don't, but I suspect that if you were really interested, you could find out in 10 minutes using Google. That would seem to make a lot more sense than screaming "Regulation!" before you knew what appraisers can and can't do currently.
That notwithstanding, I'm always amazed at how quickly folks overlook the importance of trust and reputation in professional service businesses. Do you realize how fast an appraiser would destroy its business if its clients learned that it was using their most sensitive financial information in an unauthorized way?
Can you sell the data?