By ANDY ANDREWS
Los Alamos World Futures Institute
In parts one, two and three of this series we examined definitions of privacy and secrecy, customer care, the internet, biometrics and public records.
Returning to the definitions again, is it personal or informational and is it privacy or secrecy that we want or need? And what do we want known about us? Obviously the terms differ from person to person, business to business, government to government, or any mixture thereof.
As previously noted in these columns, the information in the world doubles every year. In two years it will have grown 400 percent. In three years, it will have grown 800 percent. Clearly, much of this information (probably most) has no value to the collective world but is valued by people communicating. For the most part it is not private and when posted to social media it becomes public. So beyond the embarrassment of being seen sitting on the toilet, what needs to be kept private or secret and among whom?
A first entry on the list is bank accounts. We tend to think of these as very secure yet banking privacy and information security is not “guarded” by a singular law. Further, certain information must be “public.” When you write a check to pay a bill or for a purchase, the check has a routing number and account number printed on it. It is essential information to conduct the transaction but it could be used to target your account. For most of us this falls into the “who cares” basket because the risk involved is very small because the amount of “cash” in our “public” bank account is very small and we tend to prefer credit and debit cards. But the amount of cash in your bank account is a message about you and the detail of transactions is a disclosure of your activities.
Moving on to credit, debit, and credit/debit cards, again there are issues of privacy. Obviously, there is the potential for theft. If someone has physical possession of your card, the personal identification number, PIN, is needed to engage in a debit transaction. And we keep our PINs secret all the time, or do we? But credit cards do not have a PIN. In a person to person transaction, possession of the card is identification. On line, knowing the three digit number in the signature area on the back of the card supposedly indicates possession.
To protect our privacy and ensure our financial secrecy we have many governmental agencies at work. The bureaucracy costs money, the stuff it trades is in place to protect as well as the identity of individuals. But we cannot return to physical money only and, as a result, rely on banks and other financial organizations to exchange money for stuff. We have confidence in the system because it has governments behind it. Bitcoins anyone?
While money, value and net worth are important from a personal perspective, so is someone’s health. Your health information affects the availability of health and life insurance as well as their rates. Recognizing that insurance companies, including government entities, are in business to make a profit or at least not lose money, it seems reasonable that they should be able to assess the risks associated with each of its customers. Likewise when you go to the doctor for help or unfortunately are admitted into the hospital, you want the medical staff to have access to your private medical information. After all, they have a “need to know.” And that term suggests a movement of the data from “personal privacy” to “personal information secrecy.”
One can go on considering individual information privacy and even treat businesses and government as simply bigger individuals. If we did eliminate all information privacy, there would be complete transparency and we could eliminate all competition. While this might sound good, competition is central to the existence of both mankind and humanity. As previously stated in my column, mankind is humanity without its moral principles. And complete transparency cannot exist without certain principles. As an example, consider the fear of identity theft.
Is someone going to use your identity for his or her personal gain, financial or otherwise? This could be criminal, financial, medical, and child identity or identity cloning. Earlier in this series, I described checking my profile through an online search company. The results correctly showed no arrests or criminal activity in my history. But what if somebody had used my identification when arrested? It could have happened and if it was on my “internet record” it could have significantly affected my life.
Medical identity there could result in errors in my medical data and subsequent medical mistreatment. Stealing a child’s social security number can be useful to the thief because there is essentially no information associated with it, good or bad. And financial is obviously using your information, such as your credit card, to purchase something with you money. All of these uses sound straight forward, but many might be much more subtle such as social networking on the web where the bad person might use someone else’s identity to build your trust for nefarious reasons.
Do we need or want privacy or secrecy? Clearly we want and need both but, with the acceleration of information development and creation, the definitions are changing. We need to consider the value of the personal information we disclose and how we do it. Yet the disclosure of some personal information is essential to day to day life. We cannot personally stop data breaches but we can control our conduct. Think about it.
Los Alamos World Futures Institute website is LAWorldFutures.org. Feedback, volunteers and donations (501.c.3) are welcome. Email andy.andrews@laworldfutures.org or email bob.nolen@laworldfutures.org. Previously published columns can be found at www.ladailypost.com or www.laworldfutures.org.
