Privacy Matters

It's 10 a.m. and Richard M. Smith is ordering breakfast at a restaurant near his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. In the past several years, Smith, chief technology officer for the Denver-based Privacy Foundation and noted privacy expert, has shed light on controversial data-gathering practices at Amazon.com, Microsoft, and RealNetworks, among others. He wouldn't normally order eggs and sausage this late in the day, he says, but he's been on the road for more than two weeks on behalf of the Privacy Foundation and this was the first morning in a long time that he could sleep in.

"Our goal at the Privacy Foundation is to educate people about possible threats to their personal privacy and what tools they can use to protect themselves," he says. For advocates like Smith and others, privacy education is a full-time job.

Though most Internet users remain concerned about online privacy, many don't fully appreciate what's at stake. A research report published last August by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 64 percent of Internet users have shared, or are willing to share, personal information in order to use a Web site. Moreover, 68 percent of users said they weren't worried that someone might know what Web sites they had visited.

Meanwhile, the mad scramble for online information continues. Even as users, industry groups, and policy makers come to grips with the sometimes surreptitious methods Web sites use to collect data, they are confronted with a changing landscape. New ways of gathering information come to light; major Web sites alter their privacy policies; and dot coms go out of business, leaving unprotected the data they've gathered. And new technologies such as wireless tracking and interactive television are poised to enter the picture.

Smith believes life would be better if companies treated personal information the way the American Library Association does. "Librarians have been dealing with issues of privacy for a hundred years. They decided they wouldn't give out lists of the books people took out, and once the book was returned, they'd throw away the check-out records," he says.

If only it were that easy.

The Siege Continues

What some people don't understand is that the Internet is more privacy-invasive than anything we've had to deal with before," explains Smith. "Anybody can get a name and address and put it in a little context. But the Internet lets [marketers] put it in a lot more context, with everything you've bought, everything you've read about, and everything you've looked for in a search engine.

"What's also important is what happens to the information later. After companies have collected all this data, even if it's for benign reasons, not only will third-party marketers want access to it, but the police will want it, the FBI will want it, and lawyers will want it."

"He's right," says attorney Ira Rothken when told of Smith's prediction. Rothken brought the first lawsuit against DoubleClick in January 2000 after the online advertising company said that it intended to marry information it had gathered online to personal information it had acquired by buying Abacus Direct.

The ensuing uproar forced DoubleClick to reverse its decision and prompted the Federal Trade Commission to start an investigation. In January 2001, after concluding that DoubleClick hadn't violated its privacy policy, the FTC dropped its inquiry but the lawsuits continue.

"As a lawyer in workplace litigation or another matter between companies, the first thing I do is subpoena all e-mail," says Rothken. "Now I'll find out your cookie IDs and I'll subpoena all of DoubleClick's data files to find out your surfing habits." (See "The No-Privacy Workplace" for more on workplace surveillance.)

Smith wonders whether serious online privacy laws will pass only following some high-profile case, as when Judge Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination was derailed, in part, because investigators unearthed his video rental habits. That ruckus led to a law preventing video stores from revealing what titles people rent.