AFFIRMATIVE-CONSUMER/INTERNET-SIGNIFICANCE 346

INFORMATION FROM VARIOUS SOURCES IS COMBINED, COMPOUNDING PRIVACY RISKS

EVERYONE IS IMPACTED BY EMERGING THREATS TO PRIVACY FROM DATA AMALGAMATION

TERESA DIXON MURRAY; The Plain Dealer, March 20, 2000; Pg. 1C TITLE: KEEPING YOUR LIFE PRIVATE; PROTECTING PERSONAL DATA IS BECOMING TOUGHER IN THE INFORMATION AGE // acs-VT2001

"It's not just the telephone calls at dinner and the junk mail in your mailbox anymore," said David Butler, spokesman for the non-profit advocacy group Consumers Union in Washington, D.C. "Companies have become much more aggressive in buying information, and many institutions routinely can and do give out Social Security numbers, account balances and credit-card purchase information. It literally affects everyone."

CYBERSPACE POSES THE LARGEST RISK TO PRIVACY BECAUSE OF THE ABILITY TO COLLECT DATA COVERTLY AND THEN COMBINE IT

KARLIN LILLINGTON, The Irish Times, March 24, 2000 SECTION: CITY EDITION; BUSINESS THIS WEEK 1; NET RESULTS; Pg. 60 TITLE: EU, US privacy agreement a cause for alarm Decision to postpone considering Net issues is worrying since cyberspace is where the greatest abuses can be perpetrated // acs-VT2001

But cyberspace is where the greatest abuses can be perpetrated, simply because of the range of ways in which precise information can be gleaned about you, without your knowledge. Such information can then be distributed in ways you never foresaw.

That might mean you get turned down for a mortgage, a job or a healthcare policy. Less sinisterly, but perhaps more annoyingly, uncontrolled access and usage of such information threatens to turn the Internet into a direct marketing nightmare.

CONSUMER DETAILS ARE SIGNIFICANT AND THREATENING WHEN BROUGHT TOGETHER INTO AN ELECTRONIC DOSSIER

Robert O'Harrow Jr., The Washington Post January 2, 2000, SECTION: FINANCIAL; Pg. H01 TITLE: HORNING IN ON PRIVACY; As Databases Collect Personal Details Well Beyond Credit-Card Numbers, It's Time to Guard Yourself // acs-EE2001

By themselves, details about you don't mean a whole lot (except to your mother). But when brought together in an electronic dossier and massaged by new computer programs, personal minutiae can give marketers, government officials and even police remarkable insight into who you are, how you think and what are you are likely to do.

Don't think you are alone--or just paranoid--in worrying about such things. This new exposure is unnerving to many. Not long ago, Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Irving acknowledged using a made-up name when he got a Safeway Club card: He worried that the record of his purchases might somehow come back to haunt him.

CONSUMER DATA, WHEN AGGREGATED, POSES A SERIOUS PRIVACY THREAT

Now that we've lived in the new millennium for a whole day, it seems sensible to begin worrying what great bugaboos it will bring. My candidate: the loss of privacy.

Yes, everybody knows it's hard to do much these days without having someone somehow recording our business. Think about the personal details you shared to buy gifts at Amazon.com or holiday meals with a Safeway Club card.

Amazon "learned" your credit-card number, your phone number, your e-mail address and the fact that you or your family like hard-boiled detective stories. Safeway recorded for posterity your need for Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo.

Small potatoes, maybe, but consider this: It's just the beginning. Wait until marketers, the police and snoops of all sorts get really good at sweeping up and analyzing all that data. The question is, what can we do when all that scrutiny makes us as queasy as cheap champagne?

THE REAL THREAT IS NEITHER GOVERNMENT INTRUSION NOR CRIME FIGHTING, BUT FROM A NFW HUGE INFO-HARVEST CORPORATIONS

John Schwartz, The Washington Post, March 29, 1999, SECTION: FINANCIAL; Pg. F21; TITLE: A Middle Ground in the Privacy War? Web // acs-EE2001

I called Etzioni to ask about his book. He said civil libertarians talk about the threat of government intrusion into our lives, and government talks about the threat of criminals, but that the more he got into his research, the more it seemed that the two sides were missing "the number one enemy -- it's a small group of corporations that have more information about us than the East German police ever had about the Germans."

CORPORATE MERGERS MAKE DATA MINING BROADER AND DEEPER, AND MUST BE CONTROLLED TO PROTECT CONSUMERS

MARY VANAC; PLAIN DEALER REPORTER, The Plain Dealer, March 19,; Pg. 1H TITLE: YOUR BANK HAS YOUR NAME, YOUR BIRTH DATE, YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. // acs-VT2001

Some consumer advocates fear that data mining will get broader and deeper as banks, investment and insurance companies are allowed to merge under separate provisions of the new banking law.

"We're distressed that Congress did not provide for meaningful privacy protection," said Jean Ann Fox, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

"We say banks should use the information you provide for the purposes you provided it," Fox said. "If they want to use it for anything else, they should have to ask your permission. The burden shouldn't be on the consumer to say, No, you can't.'"

CONSUMER INFORMATION IS TRADED AND SOLD BETWEEN WEBSITE OPERATORS

Charles Sykes, Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Institute, THE END OF PRIVACY, 1999, EE2001-JGM,p.69

Big Brother has simply set up shop at the nearest mall. The evidence suggests that he is doing a brisk business. Although surveys continue to show that users of the Internet are deeply concerned about privacy, technology and economics continually change the rules of the game. Many of the biggest commercial Web sites have already entered into agreements to pool information about their customers into a massive new system that now tracks the behavior of tens of millions of users. The system known as Engage, designed and run by CMG Information Services, gathers together information from dozens of sites into a central database, providing extraordinary dossiers on everything from your taste in magazines to your sporting enthusiasms. Engage works by planting an identifying number on the computer hard drive of every person who visits one of the sites in the system. By mid-1998, Engage reportedly had already created anonymous profiles of 15 million Net surfers.25 The ID number then allows participating businesses to learn everything that other businesses have also learned about you. "If someone comes to your bookstore for the first time," explains David S. Wetherell, CEO of CMG, "you can find out if they are interested in mountain climbing, organic gardening and tennis; you can present them books related to their interests immediately."

DEALING IN PERSONAL INFORMATION IS BIG BUSINESS

Suzanne M. Thompson, "The Digital Explosion Comes With a Cost: The Loss of Privacy," Journal of Technology Law and Policy, Spring 1999, 4 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y 3, EE2001-JGM, P.16

Dealing in personal information in the private sector is a profitable industry. n21 Transactional data represents an efficient source of information that, when made available to direct marketers, can be a useful and valuable tool. n22 With the increase of personal computing in the last decade, it has been easier than ever to build a detailed profile of an individual's behavior, political views, product preferences, health status, and other personal identifiable information. n23 The compilation of this data results in targeted marketing by the direct marketing industry. Whether these companies buy lists from on-line service providers, grocery stores, credit card transactions, or bank transactions, the manipulation of these lists allows direct marketers to target the consumer's needs by mail solicitations or targeted advertisements.

MASS DATA COLLECTION CAN EASILY SPREAD FALSE OR INACCURATE PERSONAL INFORMATION

Suzanne M. Thompson, "The Digital Explosion Comes With a Cost: The Loss of Privacy," Journal of Technology Law and Policy, Spring 1999, 4 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y 3, EE2001-JGM, P.18

The proliferation of computerized personal data also has other consequences beyond the misuse of personal information. The use and sale of personal identifiable information along with the extensive secondary use of such data facilitates error. The increased amount of information being collected and sold through the use of computers undercuts the accuracy and completeness of the information. n31 Once an error, such as an incorrect address, is collected and stored in a database, it is easily multiplied when sold to a number of buyers of personal data. n32 Although the marketplace might control the dissemination and propagation of incorrect data by refusing to deal with unreliable sources, the amount of error in current databases far outweighs the ability to use discretion in purchasing reliable lists of personal identifiable information. n33

INFORMATIONAL PRIVACY IS THREATENED BY POSSIBLE SECONDARY USE OF THE DATA COLLECTED

Mary J. CuInan & Robert J. Bies, Assoc. Prof. in School of Business & Assoc. Prof. of Management, Both at Georgetown Univ., "Managing Privacy Concerns Strategically," VISIONS OF PRIVACY: Policy Choices for the Digital Age, 1999, EE2001 - JGM, p.152-3

The failure of firms to use personal information in accordance with social norms for acceptable use may raise two kinds of information privacy concerns if individuals perceive they have lost control over the personal information they have disclosed. First, an individual's privacy may be invaded if unauthorized access is gained to personal information as a result of a security breach or an absence of appropriate internal controls. Second, because computerized information may be readily duplicated and shared, there is the risk of secondary use, that is, information provided for one purpose is reused for an unrelated purpose without the individual's knowledge or consent. Secondary use includes sharing personal information with others who were not a party to the original transaction or the merging of transaction and demographic or psychographic data to create a computerized profile of an individual by the organization that originally collected the information.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE DATABASES ARE LINKED IN A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP

Charles Sykes, Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Institute, THE END OF PRIVACY, 1999, EE2001-JGM, p.60

The result is a symbiotic relationship between the databases in the public and private sectors. Government technology and public records form the backbone of the direct-marketing programs. In turn, the resources of the private market vastly expand the capabilities of the government agencies themselves. In some ways, the new datawebs have turned privacy protections on their head. If anyone ever proposed permitting government agents to track our purchases, monitor our phones, read our medical files, or keep us under video surveillance, the suggestion would have been rejected out of hand and with extreme prejudice. But, increasingly, government agencies no longer need such powers because we are already being watched by others who do not have the limitations put on the government by the Fourth Amendment. Even though much of the information is gathered by private entities, they have, in effect become surrogates for government agencies that want to keep track of us. All the agencies have to do is buy the information like anyone else. According to privacy expert David Banisar, the FBI, DEA, and IRS have all secretly purchased direct-marketing lists to add to their own investigative databases. Banisar notes that the DEA went so far as to have the Tennessee Valley Authority purchase such lists on its behalf.

DATABASE MARKETING IS INTRUDING INTO INDIVIDUALS' LIVES

Ann Cavoukian, Ph. D, Info. and Privacy Commission in Ontario, and Don Tapscott, Alliance for Converging Technologies, 1997; WHO KNOWS, EE 2001 -mfp p. 90

"Does it seem as if a lot of companies are taking quite a friendly interest in your life these days?" a Business Week cover story asks. Database marketing is nothing new, except that today much more refined techniques are being used to identify expressly targeted sectors and individuals. This precisely directed intrusion into our lives has been called many things: niche marketing, one-to-one marketing, relationship marketing, dialogue marketing, and loyalty marketing (accompanied, not surprisingly, by loyalty engineering departments).

Much faster computers, combined with parallel computing and new information techniques, enable marketers to identify smaller and smaller "niches" of the population, ultimately zeroing in or "drilling down" to the individual level. The ability for "data mining" represents considerable progress from mass marketing (where undifferentiated consumers all receive identical solicitations) and market segmentation (consumers being broken down into smaller segments based on common demographic features-they live in the same neighborhood; they all bought Toyotas). Companies say that now they can get to know you much better and develop a relationship with you, just like in the good old days of the corner grocer. But the corner grocer had limited knowledge about you, information that you would have chosen to impart to him. You also would have known something about him.

WHEN ONLINE SERVICES RECEIVE SECONDARY INFORMATION ON AN INDIVIDUAL THE INFORMATION CAN SPREAD TO MANY DIFFERENT SOURCES

Ann Cavoukian, Ph. D, Info. and Privacy Commission in Ontario, and Don Tapscott, Alliance for Converging Technologies, 1997; WHO KNOWS, EE 2001 -mf p p. 68-69

Growth in the secondary uses of your personal information may come from online service providers-companies that provide you with access to the Internet as well as other information services. The largest of such companies are probably well known to you: CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy, to name a few. These service providers are growing at a fast pace. And every time someone signs up with them, they receive a wealth of personal information, information ripe for sale as customer lists to marketing companies.

INTERNET DATA COLLECTION WILL BE ABLE TO TRACK YOUR ENTIRE LIFE

Noble Sprayberry, The San Diego Union-Tribune, August 22, 1999, SECTION: BUSINESS Pg. I-9 TITLE: Confronting the cookie monster; The issue of privacy confounds business and the consumer // acs-EE2001

Eventually, technology will allow managers of Web sites to track not only transactions but every mouse click a user makes.

Detailed profiles of a person's buying habits, hobbies and health concerns could emerge, allowing data miners to sell the information to law enforcement, insurance companies and employers, Givens says.

"It would be like an invisible camera following you around through your whole life," she says.