Personal Privacy v. the Print-Out

EXCEPT for the very rich, physical privacy is rapidly becoming an almost unobtainable luxury. In today's crowded cities, the paper-thin walls of offices and apartments expose not only the quarrels of modern man but even his yawns. He is observed by hidden cameras when he shops. This year, 12 million U.S. citizens will face the possibility of a $100 fine and/or 60 days in jail if they refuse to answer certain questions about their income and job on the 1970 census. Although a developing body of law has begun to establish the rights and wrongs of wiretapping and bugging, modern technology provides Government agencies and others with ever more subtle and delicate means of surveillance. Legislatures and courts have hardly begun to deal with what may soon prove to be the greatest threat to man's "right to be let alone," as Louis Brandeis once described it. The threat is modern information-processing techniques, most notably that ubiquitous tool of post-industrial society, the computer.

Moral Capital

Political Scientist Alan F. Westin of Columbia University defines privacy as the right "to determine what information about ourselves we will share with others." In certain primitive tribes, people will not give their names to strangers for fear that they will thereby surrender part of themselves. Foolish as the custom may seem to modern man, it has a point: an individual's information about himself represents a large part of what Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried calls his "moral capital." Some of this information, by right and necessity, he wants to keep to himself. Some of it he will share with his family and friends, some he will admit --often willingly, often reluctantly--to the impersonal organizations he must deal with in daily life. Westin argues that an attack on a man's ability to control what is known about him represents a basic assault on his humanity; to the extent that it is successful, it limits his freedom to be himself.

What makes this trespass on self possible is the fact that a man's life today is largely defined and described by written records, many of which remain potentially available to outsiders. Schools take careful note of his intelligence and keep a detailed record of his academic achievement. His doctors have files on his health; his psychiatrist, if he has one, takes notes on his inner turmoil, his secret fears. Banks, credit-card companies and the Internal Revenue Service know almost everything about his income and financial status. Once he has ever served in the military or worked for a defense contractor, the Govern ment knows a fair amount about his family and political associations. If he has moved recently, the storage companies have an inventory of his belongings. If he has ever been charged with a felony, the FBI probably has his fingerprints and often his photograph.

At present, much of this information is scattered over dozens of locations, divided among a host of different agencies. But what if, in the interests of national efficiency, the file keepers of the nation stored their separate masses of data in one gigantic computer bank? What if the recorded lives of millions of Americans were turned into an open book--or, more precisely, an open computer printout, available to anyone who knows how to punch the proper keys? That, in fact, is what may happen in the next few years. Four years ago, a Budget Bureau task force recommended that the Federal Government establish a National Data Center for the common use of its many agencies. Under this plan, the Government's 3 billion "person-records" that have been compiled by such agencies as the IRS and the FBI would be consolidated and computerized.

Although Congress so far has been cool to the federal databank idea, it has appropriated funds to help set up limited versions of it in several states; in California, for example, all of the state's records regarding social services such as welfare, medical care, rehabilitation and employment are scheduled to be computerized by 1973. The databank idea, moreover, has already been put into being by private business. The life insurance industry has cooperatively established a firm called the Medical Information Bureau, which operates from unlisted offices in five cities, and keeps files on 11 million people who have applied for life insurance. The files contain, among other things, information on the applicant's medical condition, travels, driving record, drinking habits, and even his extramarital affairs. The 2,200 credit-investigating firms that belong to Associated Credit Bureaus Inc., together have (and trade) information on 100 million people who have applied for credit in department stores and elsewhere.

Age of Exhibitionism

Americans offer surprisingly little resistance to surrendering information about themselves. Giving up personal details is regarded by most people as a fair trade for convenience. Shoppers who like the idea of buying something with checkbooks and credit cards can hardly expect to keep their financial resources or their spending habits a total secret. Even Hollywood's ageless glamour girls have to trade a birth date (al though not necessarily the real one) for a passport. And convenient or not, almost everyone acknowledges the right of the Government to know a lot about its citizens.

Nonetheless, experts in the field of privacy fear that people have become much too indifferent about protecting personal facts that once were considered nobody's business. Crusading Washington

Lawyer John Banzhaf III complains about the unseemly curiosity that investigators show in interviewing the acquaintances of prospective insurance and credit customers. Sample question: "Do you have any criticism of the character or morals of any member of the family?" But Banzhaf also puts part of the blame on an acquiescent public: "Isn't the consumer too willing to reveal personal details for a dubious credit advantage? Isn't there too little resistance to questions?"

In a sense, the modern willingness to surrender personal information may simply be another characteristic of an age that applauds exhibitionism and encourages communal experience. Patients who once confided their psychic secrets to an analyst in the privacy of his office now act out their problems and discuss them explicitly amidst group therapy. Among American Roman Catholics, private confession is gradually falling into disuse. Thousands of people have tried to escape from the impersonality of modern life by banding together in communes--a tribal form of society that rather drastically alters an individual's prospects of privacy.

That urbane pessimist, Henry Adams, believed that the dynamo in America had taken the place of medieval man's Virgin as the symbol of power; very possibly, the unblinking, all-knowing computer may come to serve as the moral equivalent of a god figure in a world society of electronic tribalism. Nevertheless, legal experts in the field fear that Americans, in their blithe acceptance of technological inevitability, have failed to consider the broader implications of allowing information about themselves to accumulate so easily. One result is that it is becoming harder and harder for people to escape from the mistakes of their past, to move in search of a second chance. The creation of a national data bank could make it virtually impossible. Worse still is the danger of misinformation. An item of information wrongly added or omitted from tomorrow's total-recall data banks might ruin a reputation in minutes. Government and industrial prying into political opinions could produce a generation of cowed conformists.

More than Registrars

Columbia's Westin believes that one vital way to save Americans from becoming the victims of their own records is to create laws protecting a man's "data being" just as carefully as present statutes guard his physical being. He echoes authorities as far back as Blackstone in contending that "the greatest single legal safeguard to freedom has been the writ of habeas corpus." Westin suggests the creation of a "writ of habeas data," which would guarantee that personal information held by the authorities would see the light of a courtroom before it could be used.

At the very least, an individual should have the right to view publicly held information about himself and be allowed to correct errors in it. Technology's computer programmers are potentially far more than the ancient town registrars brought up to date. Before too long, some distant automated authority may know more about a citizen than the citizen himself. Inevitable, perhaps. But it is an additional reason why modern man fights ever harder for some space inside himself to call his own, beyond the encroaching outside world.

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