CHICAGO — As I type my credit card number into the blank space on Target’s online store, I’m strangely aware of how much of myself I’m relinquishing. With a click of a button, the card number, my address, and the wedding gift I purchased vanish into cyberspace. And yet, when a box pops up, asking if I want to share my thoughts of my online experience in a survey, I’m bothered.
Perhaps it’s the articles earlier this month in the New York Times and MarketingVOX about how coupons can be traced directly back to the person who used it. Or a story that Orayb Aref Najjar, a journalism professor at Northern Illinois University who specializes in cyber-communities and freedom of the press, said she recently read about how the information collected from a person is then interpreted and can be used against them.
“If you buy certain products … that means you are likely to pay your mortgage on time,” Najjar said in an e-mail. “So the information they collect about you is not neutral, and is not there to serve you … but to be bundled and sold …
“What worries me most is not the information gathered (governments always do that), but the extent and volume of information gathered and collated from different sources, and the way it may be interpreted. I worry about the competency of the interpreters. The issue becomes more crucial when it comes to information gathered internationally.”
Jay Stanley, public education director of ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, said Americans do not understand “the extent to which the information they give to one institution is stored, used, traded and combined.”
Yes, people willingly give out information to online stores and social networks. But some people also give out information unwillingly, Stanley said. They would rather not share their Social Security number and other personal information just because it’s required on some form.
Either way, Stanley says the consequences of that information sharing is mostly invisible to the individual. But over time, it is becoming more apparent how that information is being used, he said.
The ACLU is part of the Digital Due Process coalition, along with Google, AT&T, Microsoft, and technology and privacy groups, to get Congress to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Though the changes are not expected to drastically affect information gathering for the purposes of national security and marketing, Stanley said it is a stop toward making sure there is a proper process in place to broadly protect online privacy.
“With changes in technology, the substantive privacy we’ve always enjoyed is rapidly eroding,” Stanley said.
