Originally Posted by BillScann
*If a pregnant woman buys a carton of cigarettes for her father, all an insurer would know from purchasing the data associated from her Safeway rewards card is that she bought cigarettes: the insurer would assume they were for her own use.
Yeah--I've bought coffin nails for others before because I was going out and they weren't. A sufficiently sophisticated data miner would realize that very occasional purchases imply that they are for others but the data mining usually isn't that good.
People are refused employment, housing, loans and even voting rights every day based on incorrect assumptions made by data linkage programs offered-up by data miners such as ChoicePoint and Acxiom. It is to companies such as these that TSA turned to in order to implement CAPPS II and Secure Flight. TSA wanted to use data linkage to determine whether or not to grant you permission to travel in your own country. Both programs failed because of the efforts of the privacy community to expose multiple illegal data transfers from the Feds to private data miners.
Data linkage is a problem with which people are only just becoming aware. We desperately need data privacy laws along the lines of what one finds in Germany.
Actually I would prefer a different approach. Data privacy laws just force it underground. Rather I think we should accept that such things are going to happen and instead model it more like the credit bureaus--you can get copies and have recourse to correct mistakes.
I'd go a bit farther, though, and say that *ANY* organization that collects data on an indivudal (exception: secret stuff from law enforcement) must send a copy of that data every year to you at whatever e-mail address you provide. (You register on a government website, not with each company as you might not know what company.)