Inquiring Minds Want to Know
There he sits, right in my living room, the little traitor. My own personal J. Edgar Hoover, all ready to drop a dime, to blow the whistle, to spill the beans about me any chance he gets. My rat-fink computer.
It’s been up and running for about a week, tricked out with a whiz-bang Intel chip that was the last word in chippery. Now I wonder: could I be harboring the enemy? A double agent that in the guise of informing and protecting me is actually selling me out, letting others in on whom I e-mail, what Web sites I consult, what goods I cyber-windowshop for?
Under threat of boycott by privacy groups, Intel, the Santa Clara-based bigfoot in the computer chip business, agreed to pull the plug on a gizmo that would automatically transmit each chip’s serial number to any Web sites requesting it--supposedly to protect users’ identities, but oh, by the way, it’s one grand slam of a business tool.
It is pummeled into our heads that we live in the Information Age, as critical to human history as the Iron Age. Knowledge being power, data would be worth its weight in gold, if it had any weight. But whose knowledge is it, and whose power?
* Pacific Bell is in dutch with regulators over its telemarketers’ pushy sales tactics for features like caller ID. More than half of us Californians have chosen to block our numbers from caller ID. That thwarts PacBell’s hope of making big money from businesses that pay to see callers’ phone numbers, which they can then look up in reverse directories for corresponding names and addresses and voila! Instant marketing database.
* DMV privacy reforms to protect drivers from predators still leave its files open to car dealers, banks, insurers, wrecking yards and process servers, and almost all it takes to register as a process server is a couple of hundred bucks.
* Catalog creep spreads your data profile across the marketplace. Order one item--one--and every useful nugget about you gets traded or sold, and soon a dozen more catalogs clutter up your mailbox, like feeding one pigeon and having hundreds more descend on you.
* Nifty discount cards at stores and markets aren’t your reward for being a swell customer. “Member” discounts also track buying habits, giving the store perhaps $5 in free marketing data for every $1 you “save” at checkout time.
This week, in exchange for such a card, one chain’s market demanded my name, address, telephone number . . . and that skeleton key, the “open sesame” of marketers, the last barricade of privacy, my Social Security number. In return, my “privileged customer” status would have netted me 8 big cents off a box of crackers.
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A set piece in old war films is the captured soldier’s stoic refusal to vouchsafe anything but name, rank and serial number. Anyone cyber-savvy knows now that enough names, ranks and serial numbers can rule the world.
The Information Age makes our information--kids’ names, medical data, carpet or linoleum, foreign car or domestic, eat out or takeout--worth a mint. Yet in our cupidity or gullibility or affability, we toss it away as casually as filling out entry slips for some fly-by-night raffle. You don’t win, but several businesses and marketers now know who you are, where you live, how to call you and the kind of stuff you might want to buy.
While we’ve been putting up window bars against Big Brother, we’ve opened the front door for Big Buyer. For $50 or $100 or even a bargain $1.50, online services will compile a dossier on just about anyone. Call it pay-per-you.
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Whatever the elusive nature of being human, the quality traded in the marketplace is what fits in the lettered and numbered spaces. Its value is as new as the Los Angeles district attorney making “identity theft” a felony--and as old as the Australian aboriginal belief that an enemy who learns your name holds unspeakable power over you.
There are small seditions to throw sand in the system. Pay cash (Monica Lewinsky’s book purchases were on file because she didn’t). Fill out “privileged membership” forms with some imagination: Name: Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Address” 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (What, Ken Starr’s going to come after you for perjury?)
Or go ahead. Write in your name, address, even birthdate, if it gets you the complimentary brownie with a candle in it. Just be sure you know the price you’re paying for your freebie.
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com
