Privacy Debacle Top Ten

by on August 23, 2006 · 2 comments

Wired News reporter Annalee Newitz has compiled a “top ten” list of privacy debacles.

It’s easy to quibble with the results, but I was delighted to see “The Creation of the Social Security Number” at #1. Our national identifier has used its government backing to push aside all others and enable government and corporate surveillance on a scale that never would have occured under natural conditions.

In Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, I discuss how the uniform identification system we’ve built around the Social Security Number is insecure for individuals, making information about them too readily available to governments, corporations, and crooks.

The fix is nothing so ham-handed as banning uses of Social Security Numbers. Rather, it will be necessary to remake our identification systems so that they are diverse, competitive, and thus solicitous of individuals’ interests.

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About Jim Harper

Jim Harper is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. A Poli Sci major at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Jim served as Editor-in-Chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly in his final year at Hastings College of the Law. Prior to becoming a policy analyst and advocate, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the U.S. House and Senate. He avoids genuine life experience by watching lots and lots of reality TV.

Read more articles by Jim Harper.

  • Steve R.

    The discussion of privacy protection is much like automobile and airplane fatalities. An airliner goes down killing several hundred people, the news media is instantly on-site and we have shrill demands for reform. Everyday people are killed in automobile collisions with virtually no news coverage.

    The top ten list of privacy debacles is a valid list of egregious errors that need to be corrected. However, similar to automobile fatalities we are overlooking the cumulative destructive impact of the mundane daily collection of personal information for so-called “marketing purposes”. In the best traditions of Orwell a great number of company’s state in their privacy statement that they protect your personal data. Yet in the very next sentence they admit that they will share the personal information with virtually anyone. What this means of course is that a “bad guy” can simply buy the “sucker list”. Security, as such is an illusion.

    To make this worse many companies make it difficult for one to opt out of having your personal information traded. I would propose that companies simply be prohibited from disclosing customer/client information to their partners/affiliates/etc.

    In the spirit of a market solution rather than a new onerous law, we could require companies to pay a royalty to every name that is traded. Clearly these names have value since companies are trading them for potential sales. I look forward to buying a yacht with my new found revenue stream.

  • Steve R.

    The discussion of privacy protection is much like automobile and airplane fatalities. An airliner goes down killing several hundred people, the news media is instantly on-site and we have shrill demands for reform. Everyday people are killed in automobile collisions with virtually no news coverage.



    The top ten list of privacy debacles is a valid list of egregious errors that need to be corrected. However, similar to automobile fatalities we are overlooking the cumulative destructive impact of the mundane daily collection of personal information for so-called “marketing purposes”. In the best traditions of Orwell a great number of company’s state in their privacy statement that they protect your personal data. Yet in the very next sentence they admit that they will share the personal information with virtually anyone. What this means of course is that a “bad guy” can simply buy the “sucker list”. Security, as such is an illusion.



    To make this worse many companies make it difficult for one to opt out of having your personal information traded. I would propose that companies simply be prohibited from disclosing customer/client information to their partners/affiliates/etc.



    In the spirit of a market solution rather than a new onerous law, we could require companies to pay a royalty to every name that is traded. Clearly these names have value since companies are trading them for potential sales. I look forward to buying a yacht with my new found revenue stream.

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