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 COLUMN
Let's have a constitutional amendment for privacy After years of reading "get-rich-quick" schemes on the Internet, I've finally come up with one of my own.
We'll then give them several hundred different phone numbers to call to opt out. If they're able to get through, they'll be asked for their name and address -- along with lots of personal information -- and then be sent a form to fill out and mail in at their own expense. I'm sure many will respond, but enough will slip up somewhere to allow us to get the money. Now, I don't have any illusions that this scheme would pass muster in a court of law, but it raises the question of why the reverse seems to work. Banks and other institutions are allowed to take something of value from us -- our personal data and our privacy -- and convert it to their own use, while imposing on us the burden of stopping them. This was brought home to me recently when I bought a new house. Now, buying a house, as most of you know, generates a small mountain of legal paper, little of which you read and all of which you sign anyway -- just because someone tells you to. Stop to read it and you'll be soon living in a refrigerator box behind the public library. But now it seems that the process has also generated a slightly smaller mountain of "privacy notices." Almost every agency that I dealt with in that transaction has informed me that I have to contact them and tell them not to reveal my data to their "affiliates." I have to assume that "affiliates," loosely translated, means anyone who pays them enough money. Adding insult to injury, not only do I have to inform them, but I have to provide my own envelope and stamp. I've added this small mountain of privacy notices to the one that's accumulating from others with whom I do business, including telephone companies, insurance companies, the cable company, and my credit card companies. I was recently bristling under the burden of having to deal with the chore of responding to them when I accidentally read one of the notices. Like you, I barely have time to do what I need to do, and even if I fill out the privacy notices, I don't have the personal resources to actually read the page upon page of small-type legal boilerplate that accompanies them. But just today I was rebooting (again) after Windows crashed on me and an on-screen notice was scolding me for not choosing to use the Start menu to shut down. To fill the time, I started reading one of the privacy notices and came across this gem: "If you opt out we may continue to share information with program 'partners' related to those programs. Also, if you opt out, we may continue to share information as described above in the parts of this policy called 'We Share Information For Legal And Routine Business Reasons,' 'We Share Information for Joint Marketing,' and 'We Share Information Among [our] Family of Companies.'" I'm not a lawyer, but my quick lay person's reading of that says for me to opt out has a very minimal effect on the company's ability to trade my information. I'm sure their lawyers could craft almost any information-sharing agreement so that it falls squarely within those parameters. In other words, the opting-out effort seems to be pretty much of a sham. In some recent columns I've addressed the question of stealing and have found that almost everyone thinks that stealing is wrong. The point at which people disagree concerns exactly which acts count as stealing. Some people feel that keeping a small amount of found money is OK; others think it should be left lying on the ground. And there is a wide range of opinions in between. But what about the following case? If I were to take something of value from you -- without your express permission -- and convert it to my own use for my own profit, would that count as stealing? I think I'd get a lot of people to agree to that. So let's apply it to information and privacy. If a company takes something of value from me -- my privacy -- and then trades or sells it for profit without my express permission, why isn't that considered the same as stealing? I think it is. And I think that the burden to stop it should fall on those who want to profit -- not on me. Just as the bank shouldn't have to write to me and tell me not to come in and take their money, I shouldn't have to write to the bank and beg them not to trade my privacy for corporate profit. What the credit card companies, insurance companies, banks, and a host of other businesses are doing may be perfectly legal under the current laws. Ethically, it stinks to high heaven. So maybe we need to change the laws. Perhaps what we need is a constitutional amendment ensuring privacy. While many people have tried to extrude a right to privacy from the Fourth Amendment, its application is unclear even to legal scholars. We need something with the force of law that makes privacy the default and requires my permission to infringe it -- instead of the other way around. We need a good, solid national debate over privacy and then we need to see it enacted into law with constitutional status. I'm not sure that will happen any time soon. Enacting a constitutional amendment is difficult and time-consuming, and I'm not a particularly big fan of the current fad of turning every need of the moment into an amendment. Still, privacy is so important to so many issues, not only this one, that it would be good to see it clearly and forcibly spelled out. In the meantime, I'd settle for a good consumer-friendly law that captures the ethics of the situation: Stealing is wrong; taking and profiting from my personal information without my specific consent is stealing. I'm not too optimistic about that either. There are too many people making money off the current situation. We probably won't see such a law until we have a Congress and an administration that don't roll over and play dead whenever corporate lobbyists thump their chests. If you want to see such a law, write to your member of Congress. If you have other ideas, either join in our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics or write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com. Carlton Vogt is the senior editor in charge of InfoWorld's e-mail newsletters. He holds graduate degrees in philosophy and theology, and has taught ethics at the college level. He also has an extensive background in technology journalism. Discuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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