Protecting Personal Information

People today face threats to privacy on a number of fronts. Every year upwards of 10 million Americans fall victim to identity theft. Businesses swap consumer information like baseball cards. And about 233 million Internet users in North America have their Web surfing habits tracked and logged every time they use a search engine.

"As technology has improved and provided organizations with the opportunity to collect, maintain and manipulate data, the opportunities for abuses are significantly increased," says Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

How to Protect Your Privacy

Individuals can do several things to protect their privacy. Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse provide detailed guidelines for protection against identity theft, information sharing and online data gathering -- not to mention the onslaught of telemarketers and junk mail.

But those same detailed guidelines help illustrate the problem. The FTC's fact sheet, "Deter, Detect, Defend: Fighting Back Against Identity Theft," lists 16 different steps consumers should take to protect themselves, while the PRC's "Privacy Survival Guide" lists about 20. That's an awful lot of spinning around for consumers to watch their backs.

Moreover, such actions have limited effectiveness. According to Guilherme Roschke, Skadden Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "In many ways, it's out of the hands of the consumer to protect their privacy, because the data's out of your hands. And once the data's out of your hands, what can you do to protect it? It's up to the people who hold your data to protect it, and there need to be standards and requirements for that."

Consumer Privacy Laws Are Behind the Times

But while technology zips along, legislation moves at a snail's pace. "The root of a lot of potential privacy problems today," says PRC's Stephens, "is that the laws do not keep up with technology. The laws that protect consumer privacy are decades behind."

Not surprising, given that billions of dollars revolve around the information gathering abilities of companies like Google, which is in the midst of trying to close a $3.1-billion deal to buy DoubleClick to further expand its data crunching and consumer profiling capabilities.

"Information and data mining is extremely profitable to corporations," says Stephens. "In many situations a company can make more money from the information that it obtains about you than it can by actually selling your product or service."

Many such companies have powerful lobbies in Washington. In the last ten years, the communications and electronics industry alone has spent more than $2 billion on lobbying fees, and in 2006 alone donated more than $70 million in political contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Corporations have traditionally claimed they are capable of regulating themselves. But the 10 million yearly victims of identity theft, not to mention the four million tons of junk mail Americans receive every year, seem to argue otherwise.

"Unfortunately in this country there is a dearth of laws to protect consumer privacy," says Stephens. "Basically the United States has taken a segmented approach to privacy. And by that I mean that it has enacted very specific laws in specific areas to protect consumer privacy, but there is very little in the way of an overall privacy protection for consumers."

Roschke agrees, and says society needs to stop looking for patchwork solutions, and address the bigger picture. The question for people is not so much, "What 10 things can I do to improve my privacy?" says Roschke, but rather, "What sort of regulatory environment would protect privacy?"

(For information on other privacy threats, see: "Surveillance and Super Databases.")

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