Monday, March 17, 2003

Who's Winning Privacy Tug of War? Wired's article on the impending changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act contains two delicious quotes. "My bank's twist on this is that if businesses can't access information about what consumers buy, crave and earn, the end result will be slews of truly useless junk mail and solicitations, as opposed to all the carefully targeted and truly useful junk mail and solicitations consumers receive now," said one Manhattan-based bank's privacy officer. And then this gem, which addresses the heart of the matter: "The dirty little well-known secret that few of us discuss in board meetings is that so many users lie on those forms," said Fredrick Anterro, a privacy officer for a publishing firm who asked that his firm's name be withheld. "We have a suspicious amount of 98-year-old Albanian millionaire grandmothers with Hotmail addresses who own 200-plus computers and head up a tech firm who are interested in reading our newspaper," Anterro said. "We can extrapolate some information when they sign on, throwing up ads that suit whatever they are reading that day, but everyone knows these databases are polluted with lies." Well, that's ridiculous. My 98-year old grandmother isn't a millionaire, and she isn't from Albania. She's from the Republic of Tonga. 9:48:40 AM    Oh yeah? []