Pubdate: Sun, 09 Jul 2000
Source: Columbia Daily Tribune (MO)
Copyright: 2000 Columbia Daily Tribune
Contact:  101 North 4th Street, P.O. Box 798 Columbia, MO 65205
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Author: Robert Scheer
Note: Robert Scheer is a columnist with Creators Syndicate

PRIVACY RIGHTS OF AMERICANS ON INTERNET NEED PROTECTION

The recent admission by the White House drug office that it routinely
dropped "cookies" onto the hard drives of those who accessed its Web
site would have seemed, in more innocent times, like a friendly gesture.

It's difficult to think of cookies as menacing. But in the brave new
world of the Internet, where privacy has been sacrificed on the altar
of a technologically fueled avarice, the cookies being referred to are
more accurately thought of as creepy crawlers - small text files
inserted surreptitiously into your computer to stalk your every
movement on the Internet.

In this case, the spying was done by a government agency, but it's a
practice common to the way business -including The Los Angeles Times
Web site - is conducted on the Internet.

DoubleClick, the private company that did the Drug Enforcement
Administration's snooping, routinely gathers such data for business
use and already has profiles of the vital statistics, habits and
tastes of 100 million Americans.

The goal of the snooper industry is to use any means - cookies are
one, Web bugs invisible to the naked eye embedded in the graphics of
Web pages you visit are another - to pierce that shell of privacy that
humans erect for their basic sense of security. Widespread paranoia
can be expected to be the norm when the books you buy, the songs you
hear, the medical advice you seek, your religious, political and
social beliefs, and financial holdings become the stuff of common
currency available to all who snoop, whether for profit or pursuits
more perverse.

Data on individuals have always been collected and used in marketing,
but compiling and cross-filing that information was an arduous task.
What is new is the alarming speed with which modern computers can
profile the nation's population, combined with the Internet's ability
to track consumer behavior instantly and to post that information
throughout the world for all to exploit - as frightening a specter of
social control as we have ever encountered.

When the government drug agency wanted to know more about those who
looked up information on drugs and lured them to its site, planting a
cookie spy in the process, was that the better to inform or to gain
evidence to arrest them later?

To DoubleClick, it was a routine assignment in a world in which
business even more than government feels it has an absolute right to
invade your privacy for profit. And it's able to get away with this
denigration of a privacy principle because the law has been bought and
is on its side.

We are the industrialized nation with the weakest response to this
modern menace to our freedom on and off the Internet. The European
Union, Canada and Australia have comprehensive and mandatory privacy
protections in place and across all lines of business. But in this
country, we sustain the illusion that the business community is
capable of policing itself through voluntary standards of privacy
protection. It isn't. The profit to be made from "mining" consumer
data has proved just too lucrative for most businesses to ignore.

The answer is obvious, but industry lobbyists have managed to prevent
the passage of privacy legislation into law. Last year, a $300 million
lobbying campaign by banks, insurance companies and stockbrokers
ensured passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act,
permitting them to affiliate and share intimate data contained in the
massive records those companies had compiled on you. Lobbyists crushed
all efforts by pro-consumer legislators to require a customer's
permission, called "opt-in," before personal information could be shared.

The Federal Trade Commission, the agency charged with protecting
consumers, could solve all this with its proposed four-point program
of consumer privacy protection that is as complete as it is simple:
"Notice, Choice, Access and Security." The proposal would require
anyone who gathers information on you to first notify you, give you
the choice to "opt-in" and agree to have the information shared with
others, give you access to the information to make certain it's
accurate, and guarantee that the information will be held securely and
will not be passed on to others unless you authorize them to have
access to it.

The FTC also added the need for enforcement to ensure that those who
violate your privacy are punished just as they would be if they broke
into your home.

Unfortunately, the FTC has no power to impose this eminently sensible
standard on an industry too greedy to comply voluntarily. Congress
must face up to its responsibility and enact this consumer bill of
rights to protect the privacy rights of Americans and to ban this
spying on our citizens before there is no longer any privacy to protect.

Robert Scheer is a columnist with Creators Syndicate.
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