UCLA professor Eugene Volokh, another panelist at the symposium, has written extensively on how laws of trespass and contract protect people. If a Web site breaks a promise that it won't disseminate personal information that you provide, you can sue for damages. If you entrust your lawyer, doctor or bank with information that you have an expectation will be kept secret, they are liable if it gets out. What's happened with the great scare stories, that privacy advocates claim justify new laws, reinforces the fact that new laws aren't needed. After nine months, the FTC finally dropped its investigation.
Identity theft is a legitimate public concern.
But the big threat comes from lost wallets and purses, which accounted for 47 percent of the 16,000 identity theft cases reported to the FTC last year. Mail theft and fraudulent address changes led to another 23 percent of the cases. Internet solicitation or purchases were responsible for a mere 4 percent, behind compromised job and loan applications, employment records and outright theft of information from the home. Meanwhile, new federal or state privacy rules would certainly raise costs for businesses, by making it more difficult to personalize services, as most people want, and market goods and services more specifically to meet people's needs. As Orson Swindle, one of two FTC commissioners to oppose the commission's wrongheaded proposal calling for federal regulation last May, noted, the bottom line of new regulation is that it discourages competition and ultimately raises prices for consumers.