On 11/19/02 15:07, Henri Yandell wrote > > [snip...] > >Does the US have any privacy laws? The way that companies happily sell my >information off to anyone makes me think not.
I think that there is an unwritten law which is: You get what you can get away with. After all, the prez' dad won't have his iran-contra secrets revealed, because his son has ignored the laws which say that such /public/ information should be released. So... it seems that we are having accountability of the individual, down to the amount of corn bought, combined with deniability of the organization (govt., bizniz, whatever). As for Jerry's comment about the Nazis: the gathering of info doesn't automatically precede the rise of Killer Fools. It could be far milder than jackboots marching in the streets, and still be plenty bad. Imagine this: everybody dumps all their info into a big database. Some erroneous information goes into the big database in the sky, and you come under suspicion for terrorism. No amount of denial will work, of course, because guilty people who are clever and devious also deny their guilt. More likely, though is that insurance companies will find that you have a slightly higher risk of cancer and raise your premiums (or heck, cancel your insurance). Employers will find that your sentiments lie with the unions and not with the owners, and you cannot find a job. You may think that gov't has the data, but it'll be a short time until a CEO-prez figures out that there is money to be made selling the data. Bill The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be November 26 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
