The recent admission by the White House drug office that it
routinely dropped "cookies" onto the hard drives of those who accessed
its Web site would have seemed, in more innocent times, like a friendly
gesture. It's difficult to think of cookies as menacing. But in the brave
new world of the Internet, where privacy has been sacrificed on the altar
of a technologically fueled avarice, the cookies being referred to are
more accurately thought of as creepy crawlers--small text files inserted
surreptitiously into your computer to stalk your every movement on the
Internet.
In this case, the spying was done by a government agency, but it's a
practice common to the way business--including the Los Angeles Times Web
site--is conducted on the Internet. DoubleClick, the private company that
did the Drug Enforcement Administration's snooping, routinely gathers
such data for business use and already has profiles of the vital
statistics, habits and tastes of 100 million Americans.
The goal of the snooper industry is to use any means--cookies are one,
Web bugs invisible to the naked eye embedded in the graphics of Web pages
you visit are another--to pierce that shell of privacy that humans erect
for their basic sense of security. Widespread paranoia can be expected to
be the norm when the books you buy, the songs you hear, the medical
advice you seek, your religious, political and social beliefs and
financial holdings become the stuff of common currency available to all
who snoop, whether for profit or pursuits more perverse.
Data on individuals has always been collected and used in marketing,
but compiling and cross-filing that information was an arduous task. What
is new is the alarming speed with which modern computers can profile the
nation's population, combined with the Internet's ability to instantly
track consumer behavior and to post that information throughout the world
for all to exploit--as frightening a specter of social control as we have
ever encountered.
When the government drug agency wanted to know more about those who
looked up information on drugs and lured them to its site, planting a
cookie spy in the process, was that the better to inform or to gain
evidence to later arrest them? To DoubleClick, it was a routine
assignment in a world in which business even more than government feels
it has an absolute right to invade your privacy for profit. And it's able
to get away with this denigration of a privacy principle because the law
has been bought and is on its side.
We are the industrialized nation with the weakest response to this
modern menace to our freedom on and off the Internet. The European Union,
Canada and Australia have comprehensive and mandatory privacy protections
in place and across all lines of business. But in this country, we
sustain the illusion that the business community is capable of policing
itself through voluntary standards of privacy protection. It isn't. The
profit to be made from "mining" consumer data has proved just too
lucrative for most businesses to ignore.
The answer is obvious, but industry lobbyists have managed to prevent
the passage of privacy legislation into law. Last year, a $300 million
lobbying campaign by banks, insurance companies and stockbrokers ensured
passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act, permitting them to
affiliate and share intimate data contained in the massive records those
companies had compiled on you. Lobbyists crushed all efforts by
pro-consumer legislators to require a customer's permission, called
"opt-in," before personal information could be shared.
The Federal Trade Commission, the agency charged with protecting
consumers, could solve all this with its proposed four-point program of
consumer privacy protection that is as complete as it is simple: "Notice,
Choice, Access and Security."
The proposal would require anyone who gathers information on you to
first notify you, give you the choice to "opt-in" and agree to have the
information shared with others, give you access to the information to
make certain it's accurate and guarantee that the information will be
held securely and will not be passed on to others unless you authorize
them to have access to it. The FTC also added the need for enforcement to
ensure that those who violate your privacy are punished just as they
would be if they broke into your home.
Unfortunately, the FTC has no power to impose this eminently sensible
standard on an industry too greedy to comply voluntarily. Congress must
face up to its responsibility and enact this consumer bill of rights to
protect the privacy rights of Americans and to ban this spying on our
citizens before there is no longer any privacy to protect.
Robert Scheer Is a Times Contributing Editor.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
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