The Privacy Paradox: Surveillance vs. Celebrity

If you are reading this article, you are probably among the millions of Americans who received an important but little noticed message from your credit card company last month. The notice -- written in infinitesimally small print -- informed you that unless you wish your credit card company to share your personal information with banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms and other financial institutions, you must put a dash in the "Opt Out" box and return it to the sender.

I have a couple of credit cards, so I must have received several of these forms in June. But I paid no attention to them; just threw them in the trash. Now it's mid-July, so unless I take some initiative and go to sites like PrivacyRightsNow.org, which helps consumers protect their financial information, my credit card companies have the right -- thanks to loose consumer privacy protection and the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act of 1999 -- to freely share my banking records and buying habits.

Welcome to privacy protection, or the lack thereof, in the information age. Due to ever more impressive technological innovations, Americans are now under constant surveillance, whether from their employers (according to the Privacy Foundation, the Web use and email of 14 million employees -- a full third of the workforce -- is being monitored), from police (who increasingly are using video cameras on downtown streets and flashlights with built-in breathalizers) or from private industry (which more and more bases its business models on information data to sell products to consumers).

Most Americans know about the Orwellian undertones of the information revolution -- but usually after it's too late. In January, attendees of the XXXV Super Bowl in Tampa learned only after the game that their faces had been "mapped" by hidden surveillance cameras and compared to a computerized database of suspected terrorists and known criminals. Again in Tampa this year, some citizens were unhappy to discover that a similar technology -- called the FaceIt scanning system -- had been installed by the local police to search for runaways and criminals on the city's most congested streets. (Tampa, by the way, received this year's Big Brother Award from the nonprofit advocacy group Privacy International. Other runner-ups included Pennsylvania school districts, which fingerprinted children participating in school lunch programs, and the FBI's unfortunate-named Carnivore system, which searches everyone's email using keywords like "bomb" or "blast" and informs law enforcement when messages seem particularly suspicious).

Yet as every new story of egregious privacy invasion hits the newsstands, it seems a wave of shock and outrage is followed by the calm waters of indifference and immobility. Why is that? Have Americans become so frustrated by their ability to influence public policy, they have been rendered apathetic? Or is it just too hard to do the paperwork, software installation and lobbying necessary to protect one's identity?

Certainly few Americans want their financial information or Web-surfing patterns exposed to companies who will then target them with advertising or the incredibly irksome 9:00 pm sales call. According to several polls, 80 percent of Americans say that privacy invasion is among their biggest concerns. And when they hear that, come 2002, cell phones will be equipped with tracking devices, or that Digital Angel has developed a subcutaneous honing chip for humans, they tend to cry Prospero-like, "Oh, Brave New World!"

And certainly the courts have been busy arbitrating the messy intersection between technology and privacy law. The recent Supreme Court ruling on Kyllo v. United States, which examined the legality of police using a thermal imaging device on a suspected pot grower's home, has given some proponents of privacy protection hope. Justice Antonin Scalia, the occasional libertarian, ruled that the device violated Kyllo's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and therefore was unconstitutional.