At 6:23 AM -0400 6/3/01, Brendan Kehoe wrote:
>On CNBC this morning (Europe CNBC at least), there was an interesting piece
>about the July 1 deadline for financial institutions getting copies of their
>privacy policies out to people. A lady from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (I
>forget her name unfortunately) made some good responses to the questions
>presented regarding what motivation people might have to explicitly opt out of
>such things.
>
>At the beginning of the piece they talked about 500,000 different privacy
>policies going out, but some statistic arguing that less than 1% of consumers
>are choosing to opt out.
I had zero idea there _were_ such mailings of "privacy policies,"
with forms to allow "opting out" (of the selling and trading of
financial records) UNTIL I saw articles about the mailings.
I started looking more closely, and as expected, found the
polices/opt-out forms buried in the clutter of boilerplate and
advertising ("You are pre-qualified for a low-interest loan! Act now
before rates go up! Hurry!").
I suspect the vast majority of people either ignore all such mailings
or, as I do, remove their particular financial statements and
summaries and then discard the rest of the "investment tips" and "low
interest loans--act now!" crud that fills the rest of the envelopes.
This is probably a design feature, not a bug.
My recourse is to take my business elsewhere, of course.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
