http://www.msnbc.com/news/554838.asp
WASHINGTON, April 4 � The privacy war is over � you lost. Now it�s all
about survival. In the next few months tens of thousands of businesses will
send consumers billions of so-called �privacy notices.� Disguised as
garden-variety junk mail, these notices � required by a new law � hold the
keys to stopping the wholesale flood of your personal information onto the
free market.
SOME PEOPLE WILL get 20 or more of these privacy notices as
required by the newly enacted Gramm-Leech-Bliley Act, according to financial
law expert Rick Fischer, who testified before a congressional privacy
hearing this week.
Fischer�s written testimony outlined the broad reach of the Act,
noting that it mandates that banks, retailers issuing credit cards, money
transmitters, check cashers, mortgage brokers, real-estate settlement
services, appraisers, tax preparations services and online companies that
offer aggregation, funds transfer or payment services send out notices to
all their customers to inform them about the types of personal information
being collected, how it�s being used and to whom it will be sold.
Your mission, should you actually be able to tell a privacy notice
from the weekly dry cleaning discount offer, is to decipher all the legalese
printed in really small type and
allsquishedtogetherlikethismakingitevenhardertoread. Having completed that
task, you then have to follow exacting instructions on how to properly
inform the company that you don�t want them to sell every scrap of your
personal information, which they�ve been collecting from you for the last
three decades.
The key phrase to look for among these piles of paragraphs is �opt
out.� Because unless you proactively �opt out� or �willingly choose to not
participate,� these companies can sell anything and everything they know
about you unless you tell them not to.
�Financial and medical records, what you buy, where you shop, your
genetic code, are all exposed in a privacy free-for all,� Frank Torres,
legislative counsel for Consumers Union, told a congressional hearing on
privacy recently. �Complete strangers can, for a price, have access to your
most intimate secrets.�
IT�S ALL SPIT IN THE WIND
Now, corporate America is wearing this privacy information blitz like
a badge of honor. Its representatives have already testified before Congress
about the great and detailed steps they�ve taken to ensure that consumers
get the all the information they are entitled, by law, to have.
Corporate America is spitting in our collective face and trying to
sell us on the fact that it�s as fresh as an April rain shower.
�Failure to pay attention to these privacy notices may result in
sensitive financial data being sold to other companies for marketing and
other purposes,� warns Tena Friery, research director for the Privacy Rights
Clearinghouse.
But the barrage of paper and the vagueness of the language make it
darn near impossible for anyone to easily make sense of what is taking
place.
�The notices may actually be telling consumers �we can sell
information about your income, debt level, payment history, bankruptcies,
hospitalizations and much more � unless you tell us we can�t,�� Friery said.
The brutal truth about the fallout of the privacy war is that no
part of our lives is left untouched by data collection activities. And it�s
not that all data collection efforts are inherently evil � some are
downright convenient. But convenience is no excuse for the wholesale rape
and pillage of personal information by corporate America.
There should be a basic right of data ownership in the U.S. and there
simply isn�t. Privacy laws have been built over a century bit-by-bit,
stitched together in a crazy quilt fabric of confusing laws.
�This means that consumers have lost control over the ability to be
left alone,� Torres told Congress. �Often, consumers have no choice in
whether or not information is collected and no choice in how it is used.
Today, any information provided by a consumer for one reason, such as
getting a loan at a bank, can be used for any other purposes with virtually
no restrictions.�
So you and I are left with having to buck the increasing trend of
information collection and dissemination. We have to cover our own butts
because no one else will. Trouble is, even when we make the effort, there
are few strong privacy laws in our collective quiver.
For all the promise of the �opt-out� provision now codified by
Gramm-Leech-Bliley Act, there are enough loopholes in the law � put there by
industry lobbyists when the bill was being written � that the protections
are almost useless.
�Unfortunately these opt-outs, in reality, will do little or nothing
to prevent the sharing of your information with others,� Torres says.
The main reason is: Although you can opt out of having a particular
company sell your information to an outside company, any other company
within the corporate family can scarf up your data and you have no say in
the matter.
Torres believes that Gramm-Leech-Bliley should be scraped and
rewritten, this time with the consumer, not corporate greed, as the guiding
principle.
I would advocate for a right, in law, that puts consumers 100 percent
in charge of their data � and that such a right is automatically deferred
unless proactively waived, a kind of Miranda Rights for Data.
What do you think about the privacy war?
Is it over? Is there hope?
And there should be laws that make companies keep the privacy
promises they make. Such a law would have stopped eBay from its arrogant
reversal regarding the privacy of its member�s personal information.
ebay, which once promised never to sell your information to
outsiders, now says that if the company or one of its subsidiaries is bought
out or merged with another company, you can kiss all those earlier promises
goodbye.
�Should such a combination occur, you should expect that eBay would
share some or all of your information in order to continue to provide the
service,� the new eBay privacy policy states.
That kind of capitulation isn�t right; there ought to be a law
against it. There isn�t. The privacy war is over� now it�s all about
survival.
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