Junk Mail: Guess Who’s Giving Out Your Address?

Nobody was prepared for the rush when the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse launched its consumer hot line last November.

Minutes after a kickoff news conference, the phones lighted up in the offices at the University of San Diego’s Center for Public Interest Law.

“At times, we were getting two and three calls a minute,” says project director Beth Givens.

Although the calls have leveled off to 300 to 500 a month, the leading consumer question hasn’t changed: “How do I get rid of junk mail?”

Close behind: “How do I get rid of telemarketing calls?”

(For some answers, see the accompanying story.)

“It was clear to us we had struck a nerve,” Givens says.

The new hot line had tapped into the bottled-up anger and confusion of consumers caught in a marketing revolution that began to explode in the 1980s.

Direct marketing, which refers to the selling of merchandise by mail or telephone, is as old as the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. But two factors have driven recent growth:

* The development of mini-computers and specialized software allows any business or individual to match names and addresses and merge additional data. The results are mailing lists that identify individuals by address, sex, age and credit-card purchases--a far cry from the 1970s when the best a retail company could do was send mailings based on ZIP code.

* The American consumer is increasingly willing to shop from home. More than half the adult population ordered merchandise by mail or telephone in 1992, according to the Direct Marketing Assn.

There is a plus side. Precisely targeted consumers are getting mailings about items they might want. “All I did was order a composter and now I get about a dozen organic gardening catalogues a month,” says a Valley homeowner.

However, there’s a downside. Not only is the sheer volume of junk mail starting to look like too much of a good thing, but there is growing suspicion about invasion of privacy.

Says Givens: “People are concerned about the technology--who has access to their credit reports, how personalized junk mail ends up in their postal box.”

What the hot-line callers express, she says, is a “rather fuzzy notion that their name and address somehow get sucked out of the atmosphere into a computer.”

To educate the public, her staff of five has developed the hot line, a computer bulletin board and a sheaf of fact sheets on privacy issues.

Want to know how telemarketers get your number? A Clearinghouse fact sheet explains that any time you dial 800 or 900 numbers, your own number may be revealed through Automatic Number Identification and sold to other marketers.

When you sign up for a contest or a drawing, “such giveaway promotions may have less to do with gifts than they do with obtaining your number for a sales pitch,” says the Clearinghouse.

“The most common way of information getting out is that we simply give it out, very naively, without further thought as to where it might end up,” says Givens.

Other Clearinghouse fact sheets deal with direct mail, cordless and cellular phones, harassing phone calls, credit reporting, medical records privacy, and federal and state privacy protection laws and regulations.

Funded by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Telecommunications Education Trust, the Clearinghouse is believed to be a first. Its immediate role is to educate consumers about the impact of technology. Its long-range function is to compile research on what concerns Californians regarding privacy and technology and recommend privacy legislation.

Givens’ observation--the naivete of most consumers--is echoed by Eric Larson, whose new book, “The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities,” describes links between data collection and direct marketing.

Larson, a Wall Street Journal writer, got interested in the subject the week after his daughter was born, when Procter & Gamble delivered a sample package of diapers to his doorstep. How did they know he was a new father?

“Someone out there was observing my little family and gauging its progress through time,” he writes. “But who?”

Larson’s book traces a series of changes in marketing during the ‘80s as computers got smaller and faster and software more sophisticated.

“There’s a lot of very sly stuff going on,” Larson says. “If you’re pregnant and buy a maternity outfit and the store invites you to fill out a little guest book with your due date, that information will be shared. New mothers are one of the hottest targeting areas around.”

Other top targets, he says, are people getting credit cards for the first time (the presumption being that you’ll go on a spending spree), people who just bought a car and people who have bought their first house.

Larson advises consumers that when you fill out a warranty card or postal change-of-address form or subscribe to a magazine or order anything via 800 or 900 services, your personal data will be passed on to marketing companies.

Larson looks ahead to the merging of intelligence technologies and foresees a “cyberspace” era of computers, fiber-optic superhighways and interactive cable television invading our lives.

One example is the checkout scanner first installed by supermarkets and other retailers to track inventory. It has become “an electronic window on our consuming soul,” says Larson, with the potential to record every purchase. “Your secrets are known: You have hemorrhoids, arthritis and a nasty case of hay fever every spring. . . . The marketers have discovered things about consumers they never could have known before.”

Larson recommends a major overhaul of the nation’s privacy laws. In the meantime, his advice is brief: “Stay low and pay cash.”

Direct-marketing proponents point out they are offering a service. “More than 101 million Americans last year shopped direct. They want the extended shopping hours and immediate delivery,” says Deborah Zizmore at the Direct Marketing Assn.’s New York headquarters.

Marketers are concerned about privacy, she says. “We have a privacy task force and a set of ethical guidelines. Direct marketers don’t want to send anything to you unless they think you want it.”

Michael Esh, a Sausalito, Calif., house painter and writer and founder of the Stop Junk Mail Assn., became active two years ago when he returned from a vacation and couldn’t open his front door because of the junk-mail pile that had been delivered through the slot.

His organization encourages consumers to get their names off mailing lists by writing to the Direct Marketing Assn., but that’s only part of the solution, he says.

His nonprofit organization lobbies on privacy issues and offers a $17.50 membership, which includes a name-deletion service.

Esh’s immediate concern is the U.S. Postal Service, which licenses direct-mail companies to update lists from the cards consumers fill out to register new addresses. According to a report last November from the U.S. House Committee on Government Operations: “Few people now realize the Postal Service shares new address information with the nation’s largest mail-list companies and that these companies in turn sell it to thousands of mailers.”

Esh has lobbied for legislation (pending in Washington) that would require a box on address- change cards allowing people to indicate whether they want their names and addresses passed on.

At the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, part of the staff’s work is to prepare a report to the state Legislature and Utilities Commission suggesting legal reform. Says Givens: “At the end of our first year of hot-line operation, we will analyze hot-line data, see what Californians’ concerns are, compare that with existing laws and regulations, and make observations about where personal protections are lacking.

“We don’t have the types of laws that European countries have, either on state or federal level, that say both private and government entities must tell you if they are collecting information about you and allow you to give your consent for additional uses of information,” she says.

“What we do have is the privacy act of 1974, which deals with federal government agencies and a hodgepodge of single-issue regulations.”

The more than 50 personal-privacy bills pending in Sacramento (including caller identification, credit, criminal records, government records, medical records and telemarketing) indicate that this is a pressing issue.

“We’d like to see omnibus privacy protection considered on the state and federal levels establishing the principle that information collected for one purpose cannot be used for another purpose without the permission of the subject of that information,” Givens says. In the meantime, she advises: “We simply need to become more watchful and more aware of how we give our information.”