Get Ready for Your Life as a Marketing Tool

The U.S. Congress is about to pass a law that would destroy the last vestiges of personal privacy by allowing banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies to swap information revealed on your checking, credit card, loan and other financial accounts. The same bill would preempt state laws preventing insurance companies from revealing intimate information in your medical records.

The landmark bill, sought for decades by financial service companies, would give them the power to merge their activities into ever more powerful conglomerates selling services, including insurance, banking and stocks. But in giving the money moguls what they long wanted, Congress pointedly ignored the protection of the consumers of those services.

Under the bill now in a House-Senate conference committee, that information can be swapped without restraint among the various affiliates of a conglomerate without obtaining the explicit permission of the customer. If the bill becomes law, a clerk in the company that sells you auto insurance will have access to your canceled checks and credit card records held by an affiliated bank.

Let’s say you have been writing checks on a bank account at some sleepy branch in your hometown for the past decade. That information would, under the terms of the proposed law, be available to any insurance company that merges with your bank. In other words, a check that you wrote for a prostate operation, a trip to Las Vegas or a prescription drug would be common knowledge to all of the company’s far-flung local agents.

Strong consumer opposition has developed to the bill’s preemption of state laws preventing the sharing of confidential medical records. But the no less onerous invasion of the privacy of our financial data has gone largely unnoticed.

There was a time when that information would have remained buried and rarely disturbed in dusty vaults. But in the day of the wired world, such information is translated, in excruciatingly refined detail, into consumer profiles and sold as an invaluable marketing tool. Cross-references among all your accounts are a few computer keystrokes away from prying eyes, and it’s inevitable that such information will make its way through the Internet to an army of waiting telemarketers and private investigators who are not entitled to this data.

This did not have to be. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a long-time advocate for consumer privacy, had offered a reasonable safeguard in the form of an amendment requiring you, the customer, to grant explicit permission before your bank or any other financial institution passed around your personal information. That consumer protection had been written into the original House bill in committee, with bipartisan support.

But as the bill made its way to the full House, the Markey amendment was killed after the frantic efforts of lobbyists for the mammoth financial institutions. They were quite forthright in their stated purpose: They want access to your financial profile so they can more effectively target you for their products. But that may be just what you don’t want--yet another telemarketing call from a credit card company that happens now to be affiliated with, say, your stockbroker.

Markey tried again before the full House with an amendment to allow consumers to just say no to having the details of their financial life passed around. But as the clock ticked to midnight on July 1 before the holiday recess, all but one Republican and 10 Democrats voted against the Markey amendment.

What is in store for us is a world in which your gossipy neighbor, eager car salesman, frantic long-distance carrier, spurned boyfriend and that ever-aggressive army of credit card pushers will have access to the intimate details of your life as revealed in your history of purchases, bill payments and credit profiles.

There is no stopping the brave new wired world; electronic data transmission is obviously the dominant fact of modern economic life. But for just that reason, there is a glaring need for the adoption of privacy protections to block that technology at the point where it intrudes, unwanted, into your personal life.

The operative word is unwanted. To his credit, Markey in his opposition to the exchange of financial and medical data has insisted that the consumer should decide what’s unwanted, not the commercial giants, as this law would have it.

This bill can still be stopped. Call or e-mail your congressional representative that you don’t want him or her giving anyone the right to snoop in your medical or financial records.