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Willis H. Ware
1. Introduction
2. Historical Development
3. United States Posture
4. Source of the Problem
5. Privacy as a Public Policy Issue
6. Contemporary Privacy
6.1 Current Example
7. Public Policy Again
7.1 An Illustration – CNI
8. The Broadened Public Issue
9. Possible Approaches to Protection
10. Related Effects
11. Privacy as Social Equity
12. New Privacy Versus Old
13. Context for New Privacy
14. Privacy Versus Public Distaste
15. The Future for Privacy
16. References
There is currently a group of six lawsuits against TRW Credit Data for allegedly providing inaccurate or inappropriate data to its clients. One assertion is that it reports bill-payment practices; how can it do that? Easily and simply (Reference 6).
Recall the incident of Lotus Marketplace: Households. Using data supplied by Equifax from its own files and combined with other sources, Lotus Development Corporation proposed to market a CD-ROM database of 120 million individuals containing a wide assortment of facts about each: name, address, gender, age, marital status, dwelling type, neighborhood income, neighborhood lifestyles, buying propensity – overall, a quite good dossier on half the people in the country (Reference 7).
Each credit card issuer makes a monthly report to TRW of the account status. There is no problem at all inferring one’s clearly evident payment record on such accounts. Given the kind of data assembly that Lotus and Equifax did, it is clear that statistical relationships can be established between levels of income, how it is used, and credit obligations. Combine this with all known facts from the database and by inference bill paying habits – the answer – falls out. Of course, it can be wrong in individual cases, and to the extent that such derived data is used to make credit and other decisions about people, then some fraction of the country’s population is being harmed by use of incorrect data – data that it does not see, probably cannot have access to, and hence has no way of correcting or challenging.
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