Peril! Dispatches from the privacy front, part 2

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer for January 2 carried a fine article on privacy issues, mostly on that of databases.

Edward Socorro had a good thing going as a sales manager with Hilton Hotels Corp. But not long after he started, a company hired by Hilton to do background checks on new employees reported that Socorro once spent six months in jail.

In reality, Socorro was no ex-con. He protested that the background check was wrong. But still he was fired. And although he later settled a lawsuit against Hilton, the damage was done.

Socorro learned the hard way about an increasing danger in our ever-more-networked society: the reliance of corporations and governments on commercially accessible databases that mine the paper trails of our lives. It figures to be among vital privacy issues garnering wider attention in 2004. ...

Socorro had committed a minor infraction in Illinois - now expunged from his record, according to his attorney - that brought him six months of supervision, a wrist-slap often given for speeding tickets.

After that erroneously came up as jail time and Hilton fired him, it took Socorro seven months to find a new job.

Among the points made in the article:
- Databases have become remarkably efficient and inexpensive to query. Many employers, schools and even volunteer organizations now trust them in making decisions about whom to take on and whom to avoid.
- The Internet has made it far easier for anyone to obtain not only someone else's birthdates and Social Security numbers but also liens, lawsuits, divorces, and other personal but technically public information.
- Radio-frequency identification, or RFID, lets stores and suppliers track inventory - and possibly consumers' behavior or whereabouts. [Wal-Mart is a leading force in the push for RFIDs.]
- The government has begun scanning and storing foreign visitors' facial images and fingerprints.
- It also is developing CAPPS II, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, which will check travelers' credit reports, consumer transactions and other personal data. [But see part 5.]
- While privacy outcry led Congress to scale back the Total Information Awareness program, but several states are now cooperating on a similar project called Matrix, maintained by a private company in Florida.
- Recent changes in the Fair Credit Reporting Act added some new consumer protections at the cost of preempting more powerful measures enacted by some states.

Privacy advocates and civil liberties groups think some of these checks violate federal employment laws and credit-reporting rules that let consumers examine information on file about them

the Post-Intelligencer said, quoting some privacy proponents.

-"I consider the issue of public records on the Internet to be one of the most challenging public policy issues of our time," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
- "We are really on the cusp of creating a surveillance society where every action, every utterance, some might say every thought, can be traced," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program. "Our privacy is on life support, and we need to take some heroic measures to save it."
- Robert Bulmash, founder of Private Citizen, believes that companies should be barred from selling or sharing personal data on citizens without explicit consent.

Bulmash's op-in model is followed in much of Europe and doesn't seem to have adversely affected the ability of its economy to operate. The fact that such a notion is controversial here shows again, as I just said, how much business-think dominates our discourse.

By the way, be aware the Private Citizen charges fees of $10-$20 to tell a variety of phone and direct mail companies not to contact you.