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Updated: 1:14 p.m. PT Oct 17, 2006
It's vanishing, but there's no consensus on what it is or what
should be done
Someday a stranger will read your e-mail, rummage through your
instant messages without your permission or scan the Web sites you’ve
visited — maybe even find out that you read this story.
You might be spied in a lingerie store by a secret camera or
traced using a computer chip in your car, your clothes or your skin.
Perhaps someone will casually glance through your credit card
purchases or cell phone bills, or a political consultant might select
you for special attention based on personal data purchased from
a vendor.
In fact, it’s likely some of these things have already happened
to you.
Who would watch you without your permission? It might be
a spouse, a girlfriend, a marketing company, a boss, a cop or a
criminal. Whoever it is, they will see you in a way you never intended
to be seen — the 21st century equivalent of being caught naked.
Psychologists tell us boundaries are healthy, that it’s important
to reveal yourself to friends, family and lovers in stages, at appropriate
times. But few boundaries remain. The digital bread crumbs you leave
everywhere make it easy for strangers to reconstruct who you are,
where you are and what you like. In some cases, a simple Google
search can reveal what you think. Like it or not, increasingly we
live in a world where you simply cannot keep a secret.
The key question is: Does that matter?
For many Americans, the answer apparently is “no.” When
pollsters ask Americans about privacy, most say they are concerned
about losing it. An MSNBC.com survey, which will be covered in detail
on Tuesday, found an overwhelming pessimism about privacy, with
60 percent of respondents saying they feel their privacy is “slipping
away, and that bothers me.”
People do and don't care But people say one thing and do another.
Only a tiny fraction of Americans – 7 percent, according to a recent
survey by The Ponemon Institute – change any behaviors in an effort
to preserve their privacy. Few people turn down a discount at toll
booths to avoid using the EZ-Pass system that can track automobile
movements. And few turn down supermarket loyalty cards. Carnegie
Mellon privacy economist Alessandro Acquisti has run a series of
tests that reveal people will surrender personal information like
Social Security numbers just to get their hands on a measly 50-cents-off
coupon.
But woe to the organization that loses a laptop computer containing
personal information. When the Veterans Administration lost a laptop
with 26.5 million Social Security numbers on it, the agency felt
the lash of righteous indignation from the public and lawmakers
alike. So, too, did ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Bank of America, and
other firms that reported in the preceding months that millions
of identities had been placed at risk by the loss or theft of personal
data So privacy does matter – at least sometimes. But it’s like
health: When you have it, you don’t notice it. Only when it’s gone
do you wish you’d done more to protect it. But protect what? Privacy
is an elusive concept. One person’s privacy is another person’s
suppression of free speech and another person’s attack on free enterprise
and marketing – distinctions we will explore in detail on Wednesday,
when comparing privacy in Europe and the United States. Still, privacy
is much more than an academic free speech debate. The word does
not appear in the U.S. Constitution, yet the topic spawns endless
constitutional arguments. And it is a wide-ranging subject, as much
about terrorism as it is about junk mail. Consider the recent headlines
that have dealt with just a few of its many aspects:
# Hewlett Packard executives hiring private investigators to
spy on employees and journalists.
# Rep. Mark Foley sending innuendo-laden instant messages – a
reminder that digital communication lasts forever and that anonymous
sources can be unmasked by clever bloggers from just a few electronic
clues.
# The federal government allegedly compiling a database of telephone
numbers dialed by Americans, and eavesdropping on U.S. callers dialing
international calls without obtaining court orders.
Privacy will remain in the headlines in the months to come, as
states implement the federal government’s Real ID Act, which will
effectively create a national identification program by requiring
new high-tech standards for driver’s licenses and ID cards. We'll
examine the implications of this new technological pressure
point on privacy on Thursday.
What is privacy?
Most Americans struggle when asked to define privacy. More than
6,500 MSNBC readers tried to do it in our survey. The nearest thing
to consensus was this sentiment, appropriately offered by an anonymous
reader: “Privacy is to be left alone.” The phrase echoes a famous
line penned in 1890 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice William
Brandeis, the father of the American privacy movement and author
of “The Right to Privacy.” At the time, however, Brandeis’ concern
was tabloid journalism rather than Internet cookies, surveillance
cameras, no-fly lists and Amazon book suggestions. As privacy threats
multiply, defending this right to be left alone becomes more challenging.
How do you know when you are left alone enough? How do you say when
it’s been taken? How do you measure what’s lost? What is the
real cost to a person whose Social Security number is in a data-storage
device left in the back seat of a taxi?
Perhaps a more important question, Acquisti says, is how do consumers
measure the consequences of their privacy choices? In a standard
business transaction, consumers trade money for goods or services.
The costs and the benefits are clear. But add privacy to the transaction,
and there is really no way to perform a cost-benefit analysis. If
a company offers $1 off a gallon of milk in exchange for a name,
address, and phone number, how is the privacy equation calculated?
The benefit of surrendering the data is clear, but what is the cost?
It might be nothing. It might be an increase in junk mail.
It might be identity theft if a hacker steals the data. Or it might
end up being the turning point in a divorce case. Did you buy milk
for your lactose-intolerant child? Perhaps you’re an unfit mother
or father.
Marc Rotenberg, who runs the Electronic Privacy Information Center
and is called to testify whenever the House or Senate debates privacy
legislation, is often cast as a liberal attacking free markets and
free marketing and standing opposite data collection capitalists
like ChoicePoint or the security experts at the Department of Homeland
Security. He once whimsically referred to privacy advocates like
himself as a “data huggers.”
‘Nothing to hide’
While very little of this is news to anyone – people are now
well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere
– there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant
of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People
write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone
to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails
were a cornerstone of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against
Microsoft. It took barely a day for a blogger to track down the
identity of the congressional page at the center of the Foley controversy.
The blogger didn’t just find the page’s name and e-mail address;
he found a series of photographs of the page that had been left
online.
No place to hide
But cameras accidentally catch innocents, too. Virginia Shelton,
46, her daughter, Shirley, 16; and a friend, Jennifer Starkey, 17,
were all arrested and charged with murder in 2003 because of an
out-of-synch ATM camera. Their pictures were flashed in front
of a national audience and they spent three weeks in a Maryland
jail before it was discovered that the camera was set to the wrong
time.
“Better 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer”
is a phrase made famous by British jurist William Blackstone, whose
work is often cited as the base of U.S. common law, and is invoked
by the U.S. Supreme Court when it wants to discuss a legal point
that predates the Constitution. It is not clear how the world of
high-tech surveillance squares with Blackstone’s ratio. What
would he say about a government that mines databases of telephone
calls for evidence that someone might be about to commit a crime?
What would an acceptable error rate be? Rather than having “nothing
to hide,” author Robert O’Harrow declared two years ago that Americans
have “No Place to Hide” in his book of the same name. “More
than ever before, the details about our lives are no longer our
own,” O’Harrow wrote. “They belong to the companies that collect
them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them in the
name of keeping us safe.” That may be a trade-off we are willing,
even wise, to make. It would be, O’Harrow said, “crazy not to use
tech to keep us safer.” The terrorists who flew planes into the
World Trade Center were on government watch lists, and their attack
was successful only because technology wasn’t used efficiently.
Time to talk about it
But there is another point in the discussion about which there
is little disagreement: The debate over how much privacy we are
willing to give up never occurred. When did consumers consent to
give their entire bill-paying histories to credit bureaus, their
address histories to a company like ChoicePoint, or their face,
flying habits and telephone records to the federal government? It
seems our privacy has been slipping away -- 1s and 0s at a time
-- while we were busy doing other things.
Some might consider the invitation posthumous, delivered only
after our privacy has died. Sun’s founder and CEO Scott McNealy
famously said in 1999 that people “have no privacy – get over it.”
But privacy is not a currency. It is much more like health
or dignity or well-being; a source of anxiety when weak and a source
of quiet satisfaction when strong. Perhaps it’s naïve in these
dangerous times to believe you can keep secrets anymore – your travels,
your e-mail, your purchasing history is readily available to law
enforcement officials and others. But everyone has secrets they
don’t want everyone else to know, and it’s never too late to begin
a discussion about how Americans’ right to privacy can be protected.
Get regular monitoring of your identity and let
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