Page 103 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

90 PRIVACY IN A CYBER AGE

shored up. (Granted, the debate about what information is sensitive and
what information is not would continue.) The law could ban the privacy
merchants from using information about consumer purchases (and other
such “less” sensitive information) to divine one’s medical condition (and
other such “more” sensitive information).
Given the current pro-business, antiregulatory climate in Congress, the
Supreme Court, and, it seems, among the voters, enactment of such laws in
the United States may seem very unlikely. The prospect of such legislation
improves if one notes that it would mainly curb those few corporations that
make selling private information their main line of business. Other corpo-
rations that merely keep profiles of their own customers’ preferences would
not be affected, although their ability to sell this information to other par-
ties might be limited in order to reduce the risk of PVT, and corporations’
ability to advertise would be set back because they would not be allowed
to use sensitive information in their targeting. Nevertheless, if such laws
against PVT could be enacted, they would help shore up privacy to reasonable
levels in the future, and without them, I expect PVT to otherwise be much
extended. It is better to ban this approach before it catches on widely then
try to eradicate it once is it has become widespread.

D. Conclusion

Corporations, especially those that make trading in private information
their main line of business—the privacy merchants—are major violators of
privacy, and their reach is rapidly expanding. Given that the information
these corporations amass and process is also available to the government, it
is no longer possible to protect privacy only by curbing the state. Suggest-
ing that norms have changed and that people are now more willing to give
up their privacy may be true, but only up to a point. The extent to which
private aspects of one’s medical and even financial condition are revealed
is unlikely to be widely accepted as a social good. And violations of the
privacy of dissenters and, more generally, privacy violations that intrude
on one’s political and social views (e.g., tracking what people read) have
chilling effects, whether or not the majority of the public understands the
looming implications of the unbounded profiling of most Americans. Self-
regulation cannot come to the rescue, because the success of self-regulation
rests on the assumption that individuals can sort out what corporations are
doing behind the veils of their privacy statements, which is an unrealis-
tic assumption. Banning the use of less sensitive information (particularly
information about purchases) for the purposes of divining more sensitive
information (e.g., medical information)—that is, outlawing privacy violat-
ing triangulation—may serve, if combined with laws that “patch” current