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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
Privacy as a Public Policy Issue
While it has never been stated as a public policy, the thrust of privacy has been to tacitly acknowledge that it is legitimate to use personal information so long as the data subject knows of the use in advance and the use treats the data-subject fairly and, by extension, is not abusive. Hence, in the Privacy Act there is a provision for announcing in the Federal Register what are called “routine uses” of specified personal information. “Fairly” is defined implicitly through the provisions of the Code; e.g., the individual has the right to see the record, to challenge its contents, to cause errors to be corrected.
There is one final observation to complete the characterization of privacy and its embedding during the 1970s. Use of personal information within government was generally to adjudicate entitlements, rights, benefits, and privileges. Thus, it was even more natural for the prevailing view to be that “government is the rascal; government is the place to watch for privacy problems.” In the 1970s, moreover, usage of personal information was generally confined to looking up the record; there was not much commingling of data from many sources, nor elaborate processing. Computer matching had not come into vogue. It was talked about but generally shouted down on the basis that records were too full of errors to match entries from different databases. There probably was a small amount of hand matching as there undoubtedly always has been.
Other than credit reporting, there was little or no “information industry” in the early 1970s; there was no organized industry whose commodity-in-trade was personal information and whose economic viability depended on exploiting such information for profitable gain.
Go to: 6. Contemporary Privacy
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