A Private Matter

What many consider ideal: unless you are a public figure of major proportions or you voluntarily release your personal information to the world, you have a right to privacy in your personal information. What’s real: forgetaboutit! Here’s a partial list: warrantless wiretaps, “what goes on the Web stays on the Web,” the very-hard-to erase hard drive, colleges reading applicants’ home page entries, consumer tracking systems, refined search engines, social networks, public information or information generated by hackers.

Whether its the 1/3 of American teens who have seen inappropriate pictures or videos of their friend and acquaintances or the 20% who have sent such images (“sexting”), that little “discount card” you use at the grocery store, information and pictures about you that are posted (often by others) on your social network page, your application for a credit card, the credit rating agencies or that thick “virtual file” about you that might sit in some FBI computer because your name is similar to a suspect’s name, there is almost nothing that cannot be found out about you with a little digging.

From the pragmatic – retailers trying to figure out how to bring “stuff” to your attention that you might be interested in – to the illegal – hackers wanting to sell your credit card numbers for illicit activity, there is virtually no privacy in a modern society. It’s worse than the proverbial small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business. We even ask the silly question, “Have you Googled yourself?”

As the same Congress that authorized both the warrantless wiretaps as well as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act struggles to find a statutory solution to privacy and to address the elusive statutory solution to content piracy, I’m seeing an awful lot of smoke drifting out of a lot of bottles. But harvesting consumer information is a huge driver of business, and in an impaired economy, we most certainly don’t want to harm businesses in their marketing efforts. That’s the view of many conservative leaders, elected representatives and even some in the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this year, Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to question the need for more personal privacy protection.

That’s where the fun actually started. As summarized in a report published in the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal on April 29^th, it seems that one Fordham Law School class, taught by Joel Reidenberg (who had earlier turned the Internet camera on himself), got to learn about Mr. Scalia, to his consternation, “up close and personal.” The class was assigned to delve into the Scalia family’s personal life, all legally-available information, and report their findings. They turned up a home address, phone numbers, grocery lists, his wife’s personal email address, pictures of his grandkids and even his movie preferences.

Mr. Justice Scalia was not amused: “‘Professor Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any,’ the justice says, among other comments... In response, Reidenberg tells the ABA Journal that the information gathered by his class about Scalia was all ‘publicly available, for free,’ and wasn't posted on the Internet by the class or otherwise further publicized. He views the dossier-gathering about a public figure as a legitimate classroom exercise intended to spark discussion about privacy law, and says he and the class didn't intend to offend Scalia.” ABA Journal.

The May 21^st FastCompany.com, noting the abundance of cell-phone-photos being poured on to the Internet, summarized our plight this way: “We leave digital footprints everywhere we go, and those footprints are becoming easier and easier to track. Although many of us believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that transparency is generally a good thing for a society, the lack of control over what you reveal about yourself is often troubling. The ease with which abundant personal info can be used for (e.g.) identity theft creates a situation where we have many of the dilemmas of transparency without enough of the benefit.”

Increasingly, despite all of the negative press and a few teen suicides along the way, young people apparently don’t even have an expectation of privacy anymore. They often learn the hard way that the mistakes of a teenager can later impact the career of a young executive. It’s tough out there, but for those not in that younger, accepting demographic, the belief that privacy is a fundamental right dies hard, very hard.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I thought you might want to know.