Page 102 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

THE PRIVACY MERCHANTS 89

medical or financial records becomes better protected online, less sensitive—
and therefore, less protected—information can reveal volumes of sensitive
information thanks to PVT. As Marcy Peek points out, “The Internet has
allowed commercial decision-makers to manipulate technology in such a
way as to identify persons according to a multitude of variables and catego-
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ries.” Each page Internet users visit and each ad they click on tracks their
unique IP address to create a detailed portrait of their offline persona. Peek
explains, “Through various means such as cookies, Web bugs, and personal
data input such as zip codes, corporate marketers can obtain a person’s
demographic and other information and ‘tag’ an individual on the basis of
such information.” The individual is then categorized and ranked against
other users. The result is “Weblining,” an online version of the offline dis-
criminatory practice of “redlining” individuals by denying or increasing
the cost of services based on their demographic. After the Fair Housing Act
of 1968 prohibited redlining, which used a mortgage applicant’s neighbor-
hood to discriminate along racial lines, banks used instead other markers
of race as a basis for racial discriminations, relying on the social clubs people
joined or churches they attended, for example. In other words, items of
information that were not sensitive were used to divine other information
that was meant to be private. Easy access to this type of nonsensitive infor-
mation streamlines this practice.
As early as 2000, Business Week highlighted a PVT service, offered by
data broker company Acxiom, called InfoBase Ethnicity System, which
matched names against information about housing, education, and income
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in order to identify the unpublicized ethnicity of an individual or group.
More recently, a computer consultant named Tom Owad wrote a simple
piece of software allowing him to download public wish lists that Amazon
customers post to catalog products they plan to buy. He downloaded
over 250,000 wish lists in one day, used Yahoo’s People Search to identify
addresses and phone numbers, and published a detailed map that showed
the locations of people interested in certain books or themes. Owad
explained, “It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or
group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then
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track them back to people.” Most people who put simple items of infor-
mation about their preferences on their Facebook profiles are unlikely to
know that they can be used to divine their personality traits with 90 percent
accuracy, as if they had taken personality tests. 92
All of this suggests that laws that ban the use of sensitive information but
do not require any action on the part of the millions of effected citizens—
the way medical, financial, and select other records are now protected—
could be reinforced by banning PVT of protected information. That is, the
wall that separates more and less sensitive types of information could be