In requesting that personal information, the city does not state whether or not the employer is required by law to supply the information. Unfortunately, employees that are faced with such requests often assume that they are required to provide the information requested when they are not and in some cases when it is even illegal to do so. What the American legal system does not do, except in rare cases, is penalize those government agencies that seek confidential information without a court order. CommerceNet questions how an Internet business, or indeed any type of business, can be expected to adopt and comply with privacy principles when government agencies routinely ask businesses to flaunt those principles by providing information to the government agency. We suggest that the following steps be taken by privacy policy standards organizations, by Congress, and by state legislatures.
Several organizations provide privacy policy standards that they encourage businesses to adopt.
However those policies frequently do not include standards for dealing with government requests for private information. Organizations promulgating such standards should consider revising their standards in order to provided guidance to businesses and their employees on the proper handling of such requests. CommerceNet invites privacy standards organizations to join us in encouraging federal and state governments to prohibit government agencies from seeking confidential information from businesses, as outlined below. Not Required by Law Federal and state law on government requests for private or confidential information is far from comprehensive. Those laws tend to target specific industries such as banking, telecommunications, video rentals or cable television.