Some new financial privacy laws have been enacted, and still more are in the pipeline. Moreover, the Federal Trade Commission banned the collection of information about children aged 13 or younger. And states are enacting scores of privacy-protection bills. In short, while far from solved, we are contending with key privacy-protection problems. I wish we could do half as well with national health insurance, poverty, AIDS or many other serious issues that plague us as we are doing with privacy.
Shopping is the area in which privacy is still largely unprotected.
Here the harm is surprisingly limited, and the benefits to the public considerable. I admit that when I began researching a book about privacy, I was at first taken aback by the detailed profiles corporations keep on our consumption habits. I, too, recited the favorite horror story of the privacy advocates, about a shopper at a Los Angeles store who fell and shattered his kneecap. The implication was that he might well have fallen because he was an alcoholic. I also was dismayed at first about identity theft, in which someone abuses another person's credit card or other personal information to order tons of goods for themselves.