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FTC Rules in Favor of Privacy
christian void writes, "The FTC recently ruled that it is illegal for credit reporting agencies to sell personal information to third parties. Here's an interesting article on a decision that will hopefully have ramifications in other industries. Score one for privacy."
"We regret the commissioners did not agree with our legal opinion, but we are not surprised..."
Heh. In other words, we knew it was illegal, and that we could make a lot of money before anyone decided to enforce the law.
<i>Trans Union has to stop selling the information or pay $2,500 for every violation.</i>
Wish criminal law worked like this for me... "Yeah, you've been consistently breaking the law since 1997, but we'll let you go without punisment, and won't bother to try to correct the harm you're illegal actions have already caused."
Intolerant people should be shot.
dejanews etc.,
intuit
...also, now they're being investigated
Doubleclick has gone back on it's promise not only not to collect personal information such as real names, ss# etc, but also on the promise not to sell the info they collected to third parties. That means if you searched for something on deja news or other search engines, browsed any sites with doubleclick banners etc., all that info is being collected(including keywords you searched for), matched with your real name and real address which doubleclick gets (I assume) from sites where you registered, and then all that is being sold to third parties.
I bet e-truste, or whatever they're called, doesn't mind, doubleclick did change their privacy statement after all (in case it didn't occur to you to check recently).
Good bye privacy, hello big broth...ahem, doubleclick.
For example, I bet it would still be OK for a Hotline Psychic Friend to take your credit card, and then (now that they are a creditor, i.e. not a "third party") look up your personal info and say "I'm sensing that you've been on a vacation... I see palm trees..."
I think the right answer is disclosure. Anytime anybody buys or sells info about you, you get notified. Then, once we had an idea of how the data is flowing, we can make a judgement as to what we like and don't like. I don't think anything short of that will be good enough.
And, that probably won't be good enough either. I mean, as much as I try to keep my social security cat in the privacy bag, you can't buy a simple thing like a cell phone without forking it over. Why isn't just my credit card good enough? Probably it would be, but the Big Brother and the Phone Holding Companies know that they can get away with forcing disclosure. How about a "no requiring of information that's not necessary" regulation.
It seems to me that this would be a much more effective basis for creating a system for selling personal information: companies must buy the rights to use a persons information. Of course, in many instances individuals would grant use of their information for free, but basing a system on this rule would grant individuals the ability to control in what way their personal information may be used.
For example, I don't want phone solicitations of any kind so would limit access to anyone wanting my phone number. In this digital age it wouldn't even be far fetched for me to allow a clearinghouse to sell my phone number on my behalf for $5 per use. On the other hand, I am active in sports so would grant permission for local sports stores to have access to my address.
This may sound radical, but it is not that different from the current practice. There are a lot of companies out there already selling our personal information. They already act as the clearinghouse I describe. All that would be needed is for them to find out from individuals in what way and for how much they would allow their information used (granted, this is not a trivial task).
Some would argue that this would drive up the cost of gaining access to personal information. As someone interested in personal privacy, that isn't a bad thing. :)
YAAC (Yet Another Anonymous Coward)