A Thousand Words Are Worth a Picture: A Privacy Tort Response to Consumer Data Profiling
2003; Northwestern University School of Law; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0029-3571
Autores Tópico(s)Criminal Law and Evidence
ResumoI. INTRODUCTION In wake of 9/11 terror attacks against United States, John Poindexter, highest-ranking official to be criminally convicted in Iran-Contra debacle in mid-1980s, successfully pitched an idea to U.S. Defense Department to create a computerized surveillance system to track everyday activities of all citizens with goal of ferreting out terrorists.1 The program, known originally as Total Information Awareness (TIA),2 would apply sophisticated computer data-mining3 techniques to sift through virtual mountains of data of everyday transactions, such as credit card purchases, e-mail and travel itineraries, in an attempt to discover patterns predictive of terrorist activity.4 If implemented, TIA's exercise in data mining would, in words of one critic, amount to a picture of your life so complete it's equivalent to somebody following you around all day with a video camera.5 In pushing legislation to curb program, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden called TIA the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history.6 The New York Times described TIA's Orwellian dossiers on each and every American as a huge invasion of privacy.7 The good news is that Congress responded by imposing strict restrictions on TIA.8 The bad news is that hundreds of private companies, subject to little regulation, are already pursuing same goals.9 Both on- and offline, businesses are collecting and warehousing staggering amounts of personal information about citizens and compiling it into electronic dossiers designed to predict way people think and behave. More than 1000 data-mining companies collect and sell data about U.S. consumers.10 Large companies like Acxiom, Experian, and R.L. Polk & Co. possess profiles of nearly every consumer and household. Acxiom's InfoBase profiler collects data from more than 15 million sources11 and contains demographic information on 95 percent of U.S. households.12 Experian boasts that its databases cover 98 percent of U.S. households and can contain more than 1000 data items per household.13 Polk's Automotive Profiling System contains demographic and lifestyle information on more than 150 million vehicle owners and 111 million households.14 Online, Internet advertising companies such as DoubleClick track clickstream of Internet users across World Wide Web, creating detailed profiles of their behavior.15 By storing small text files called cookies on computers of persons visiting DoubleClick-affiliated sites, company has stockpiled profiles of more than 100 million individuals.16 Consumer profiling is not limited to companies that specialize in data collection. Online booksellers and other retailers profile customers by tracking products they view or buy online.17 Telephone companies profile customers based on when, how often, and what numbers they call.18 Supermarkets profile shopping habits by recording and analyzing purchasing information collected through discount or loyalty club cards.19 Banks and other financial institutions construct profiles based on personal financial data.20 The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 allows them to share customer financial data with affiliated companies without restriction and to share it with anyone else if customers do not explicitly opt out of such sharing.21 We are quickly approaching a society where virtually all companies, driven by creed that the strategic use of customer information is critical to survival22 in a fast, competitive, digitized marketplace, will seek to exploit their customer data for marketing benefits.23 Current technology makes it difficult for unrelated businesses to share customer information with other businesses, because their computer systems speak different languages. However, that obstacle may be eliminated by a technology industry initiative known as Consumer Profile Exchange (CPEX). Working to create standardized XML computer markup language tags that can identify discrete types of personal data, goal of CPEX is to facilitate sharing of customer information among different businesses with ease of pressing Enter button. …
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