Page 89 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

76 PRIVACY IN A CYBER AGE

In 2005, one such company—ChoicePoint—had records on over 220 mil-
5
lion people. Professor Christopher Slobogin notes that the amount of
information culled by corporate data miners
can provide the inquirer with a wide array of data about any of us, including
basic demographic information, income, net worth, real [sic] property holdings,
social security number, current and previous addresses, phone numbers and
fax numbers, names of neighbors, driver records, license plate and VIN
numbers, bankruptcy and debtor filings, employment, business and criminal
records, bank account balances and activity, stock purchases, and credit card
activity. 6
For example, in 2009, a law professor at Fordham University gained minor
notoriety when he assigned his class to create a dossier on Justice Anto-
nin Scalia using only the information they could find online. The result
was a fifteen-page document “that included the justice’s home address
and home phone number, his wife’s personal e-mail address and the TV
7
shows and food he prefers.” Some privacy merchants even keep dossiers
on the crimes a person has committed, their divorces, political leanings,
and their interests in topics that include religion, the Bible, gambling, and
8
adult entertainment. Other companies amass lists of “victims of sexual
assault, and lists of people with sexually transmitted diseases. Lists of
people who have Alzheimer’s, dementia and AIDS. Lists of the impotent
and depressed.” 9
Although several data-mining companies allow individuals to opt out
of their databases, people must contact each company individually, and
even then information may still linger in some search results or websites.
Google, for example, generally does not remove search results if the infor-
mation contained is truthful and not illegal. 10
The privacy merchants are limited by laws that Congress (and states)
have enacted that carve out subsets of data, particularly medical and financial
records, in which the privacy merchants cannot freely trade. However,
very little attention has been paid to the fact that information is fungible.
Through a process that might be called “privacy violating triangulation”
(PVT), one can readily derive much about a person’s medical, financial,
or other protected private side by using “innocent facts” that are not privi-
leged by law. A piece of seemingly benign information—for instance, the
number of days a person failed to show up for work, or whether the person
purchased a wig—suggests volumes about one’s medical condition. By
building a portfolio of many such apparently innocuous facts, one could
infer a great deal, effectively violating the realm of privacy surrounding
individuals’ most sensitive information. Thus, a study of Facebook shows
“how the on-line social network data could be used to predict some