NP A little Privacy Rant (long)

[Doug Millison]

There's no single, centralized data repository (not yet, anyway), but 
a company certainly can -- and lots of them do -- assemble, in a 
"data warehouse," hundreds , even thousands of records containing a 
broad spectrum of information about an invidividual (from government 
public records at local, country, state, and federal levels; medical 
records; information about  purchases, phone calls, Web site visits, 
and preferences in virtually every category; plus data gathered 
through a variety of vehicles -- special interest Web sites, 
toll-free telephone-based information services, market surveys, 
product registrations, product warranties, etc.) and  "mine" it (the 
industry term is "data mining").  After applying the appropriate 
"data hygiene" techniques, a company possesses a "clean" and 
up-to-date record for each individual; the company can further employ 
a variety of methods to keep this record up to date, even as the 
individual moves from job to job, place to place, changes phone 
numbers or email addresses, etc. All standard operating procedure. To 
this record, a company can overlay information from a variety of 
sources -- with the aid of an address and zip code, all sorts of data 
overlays are available to add depth to what the company has already 
learned about the individual. Companies are indeed willing and do 
share information about customers -- they sell each other mailing 
lists and database records all the time, its an everyday business 
activity. This -- what I've described here, the data warehousing and 
data mining, devoted to direct marketing ends and to finding 
potential customers -- is all standard practice in business today; as 
I mentioned before, the information technology infrastructure that's 
now being built will enable companies to fine tune and coordinate 
these efforts to an unprecedented degree -- a quantum leap, actually, 
that will make today's sometimes stupid direct marketing programs 
seem quaint and antique.

Companies also use technology to spy on their employees.  Governments 
use this technology intrusively, too, but they remain several steps 
behind the private sector, for budgetary reasons and lack of 
expertise, primarily. In both these areas (marketing and corporate 
spying on a company's own employees and on other companies), it's 
corporations that are fast and smart (they're the ones developing the 
technology in the first place, of course) while the government 
remains relatively slow and clunky.

Big Brother is not, after all, a government leader -- he's a captain 
of industry. I hesitate to engage the libertarian debate, but it's 
safe to say that companies will continue to do this even in a market 
economy that could somehow be -- utopian dream, that -- free of 
government interference. Remove government support for corporations, 
they'll protect themselves and proactively assert their interests 
with their own hired thugs, private armies, etc., as they have ever 
since there have been corporations. Corporations don't hold liberties 
and civil rights for private individuals as core values, after all -- 
their responsibility ends at the bottom line and meeting the needs of 
investors.
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