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The End of Privacy - Softcover

Sykes, Charles

 
9780312263188: The End of Privacy
Softcover
ISBN 10: 031226318X ISBN 13: 9780312263188
Verlag: Griffin, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A cogent and telling analysis of the dangerous invasions of privacy becoming possible and all-too-common in today's technological society examines how marketing databases, federal wiretaps, and an aggressive media threaten everyone's right to personal space and offers potential solutions. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor


Charles J. Sykes is the author of Dumbing Down Our Kids, A Nation of Victims, and Profscam. He is a journalist who has written for such papers as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chicago Tribune. He is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has three children and lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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The End of Privacy
PART 1
The Attack on Privacy
1
Prologue and Introduction
Before breakfast, a businesswoman signs on to the Internet, checks her e-mail, and orders flowers. Even before she has signed off, her on-line movements have left a trail of data that has been added to her profile, including the fact that the recipient of the flowers is a thirty-two-year-old man who lives in the next suburb. Her phone records indicate a number of late-night calls to the man's residence. While she was on-line, every icon she clicked on was tracked and recorded. Someone was learning about her. Several discreet "cookies" are left behind on her hard drive.
Later that week, her purchase of the flowers will be matched and merged with the fact she vacations in Aruba, buys lingerie from Victoria's Secret, uses a high-end hair color, and drives a late-model car. Her name will be sold to marketers looking for consumers who fit that profile. The same marketers have a dossier that already runs to more than eighty-five pages about her spending habits. Every time she uses the smart card at her grocery store, the profile expands, including her recent purchase of hemorrhoid medication, contraceptives, and her preference for cabernets. She is unaware that her ex-husband's attorney has just obtained a copy. Others will be interested to learn that she logged onto an Internet message board for patients with breast cancer for the fourth consecutive day. The next week, she will unexpectedly be denied a new home mortgage.
As she leaves her apartment, the security cameras capture her departure. She seldom notices them anymore, but the cameras keep record of her comings and goings as well as those of her guests. It makes for amusing viewing at the security staff's Christmas party.
The e-mail she read before breakfast was from a coworker, who told her he planned to quit. Writing back, she expressed her own ambivalenceabout her bosses. Their supervisor, who will be waiting in her office, read both the message and her reply. Once in her car, she makes a call on her cell phone, which instantly allows her location to be pinpointed exactly (the FCC has approved new rules that require cell phones to be trackable by law enforcement); and as she speaks her conversation can easily be heard on a nearby scanner. As she passes through a tollbooth, her presence is electronically recorded by an intelligent transportation system, whose cameras snap her license plate number, recognizing it as the same car that passed the checkpoint two days earlier at 2:30 A.M.
She flips on the radio, which reports that Chelsea Clinton has broken up with her boyfriend and has checked into a clinic with stress-related symptoms. Later that day, she has her own appointment with her psychologist, who at the moment is meeting with a representative of her HMO, which is undertaking a "utilization review," a procedure that requires the doctor to turn over all of his patient files. As she drives to work, a representative of the company is reading her therapist's notes about her night terrors. She occasionally wonders about the mail she receives advertising new antidepressants, but it does not occur to her that her pharmacy has been selling her name.
 
 
 
Privacy is like oxygen. We really appreciate it only when it is gone. The death of Princess Diana, the political convulsions over Bill Clinton's sex life, celebrity complaints about the predatory media give the issue prominence. But it is not the violations of the famous that make the battle over privacy the preeminent issue of the Information Age. It is the erosion of privacy in our everyday lives.
Snoops have always been with us. From time immemorial, gossips, nags, governments, and journalists have tried to listen in our conversations, follow our comings and goings and hunt for grist for their endlessly turning mills. What's new, however, is the tools they now have at hand to watch, listen, and record. Technology makes the fears of the paranoiac of the past seen Pollyanna-ish compared with the realities of the present and the prospects of the future. If it remains true that everyone is famous for at least fifteen minutes, it is also true that the average citizen now experiences the loss of privacy once reserved for the famous and infamous.
Questions of privacy touch us in nearly every aspect of our lives, fromour relationships with our doctors, to our ability to communicate on the Net, to the intimacy of our personal relationships.
At the end of the century, the challenge to privacy comes from many fronts:
• Modern technology has made it possible to create vast new dossiers of extraordinary detail and specificity about our tastes, habits, and lives. Every time you apply for a job, subscribe to a magazine, call a mail-order catalog, use a credit card, dial a phone, seek credit, fly on an airplane, buy insurance, rent an apartment, drive a car, pay taxes, get married or divorced, sue someone, see a doctor, use a smart card, apply for government licenses or benefits, you become part of the dataweb, which has proven far more powerful than the paper trails of bygone years.
• People are increasingly anxious about the erosion of their personal privacy. In a 1998 Louis Harris poll, 88 percent of Americans said they were concerned about their privacy, while a majority (55 percent) said they were "very concerned."
• The Internet has rewritten the rules of private and public life, providing an illusion of privacy in a realm that actually is a fishbowl.
• Even as the private sector develops new techniques for tracking us, new government databases ranging from information about newly hired workers to airline passengers threatens to create a seamless dataweb that blurs the lines between government surveillance and commercial marketing.
• The National Research Council has warned that the medical records of millions of Americans are vulnerable to abuse, noting that "today there are no strong incentives to safeguard patient information because patients, industry groups and government regulators aren't demanding protection."a The federal government continues to move toward creating a single universal medical identifier that will track every visit to a doctor's office, every treatment, and every prescription for every patient from cradle to grave.
• In politics the personal has become the political, shrinking the zone of privacy, making the lives of politicians--and the rest of us--fair game. Both the Nannies of the welfare state (in the name of compassion) and the Grundies of the right (in the name of virtue) continue to narrow the zone of our lives that is no one else's business. The loss of privacy has, in effect, become a tax on involvement in public affairs.
• Fueled by our penchant for therapy and sharing, Americans share their intimacies and dysfunctions with therapists, casual acquaintances, and national television audiences. Although the effect is numbing--does anything shock us anymore?--the pressure grows for the rest of us to join in the orgy of self-exposure lest we be suspected of unhealthy repression or concealing guilty secrets.
• The hypercompetitive media continually revise their standards downward as the line between the tabloids and the mainstream press is erased. Salacious gossip in tabloids that would have once been trash-canned with scarcely a comment, now is fodder even for the gray ladies of the establishment press. The Internet is rapidly breaking down whatever barriers between rumor and news that may have survived.
• Workplaces continue to be...

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Verlag
Griffin
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
031226318X
ISBN 13 
9780312263188
Einband
Taschenbuch
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