AUSTIN, Texas - Information wants to be free. We own our own identities. Can these two increasingly conflicting views of how life and data should interrelate in a networked world find a common ground?
No one denies the urgency of the privacy issue. The Social Security Administration's well-intentioned but poorly executed attempt to give account holders Web access to its data shoved the data privacy concerns onto front pages all over the country. Those who have wrestled with the central conundrum - respecting individual privacy while dealing with commercial pressure to sell data - have welcomed the attention, however brief.
But a discussion of the issue this week at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference showed no evidence of a resolution being reached any time soon. If anything, the push to collect and distribute more and more data - from highly personal information like medical histories, credit, property records, and criminal records to relatively innocuous stuff like phone numbers and mailing addresses - seems likely to cloud things even more.
"Governments need to stop collecting so much personal data on people and combining it - we need to convince policymakers that law enforcement convenience is less important than people's privacy," said Stanton McCandlish, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a member of the "Privacy vs. Free Speech" panel.
"What's disconcerting to me is that police want more linkage of records, even medical records, and that's not the way we need to go," said McCandlish. "The public is largely unaware of this, and what details of our lives are accessible to police."
When pressed - for instance, by last June's Federal Trade Commission public workshop on privacy issues - the industry has been anxious to reassure regulators, legislators, and the public that it is capable of policing itself. But instances of unauthorized release of personal information - such as America Online's recent cooperation with a Navy request for the identity of an account holder - raises questions about the efficacy of self-regulation.
But one panelist at the Austin session argued that publicly held information - driver's license information, for example - is a public resource and, sensitive or not, should be available to anyone who wants it.
"Collecting personal information in electronic databases isn't all that sinister to me," said Solveig Singleton of the Libertarian Cato Institute. "The risk of government abuse and criminals is real, but minimal on the whole. We should focus on the person who's doing something wrong, not [on] the prospect of someone doing something wrong."
Some audience members expressed annoyance with Singleton's arguments and questioned her reasoning.
"You view businesses' rights to use that information as exceeding consumers' rights," one attendee declared. "Why, in a free world, do people's rights assume a lower importance?"
"We can't assume that people have a right to control information about themselves ... and if it's out there, it's very hard to control," Singleton replied.
