The New Enemy of Privacy: Big Bucks

Challenge, May, 2000 by Amital Etzioni

Other privacy merchants either collect massive amounts of information on potential customers or purchase the information from other companies, including details on where a person travels and with whom (secretary?), places the person frequents (massage parlor?), medications the person purchases (Antabuse?), and so on. One can also buy, from various Web sites, detailed accounts of individuals' stock holdings, account balances, and other financial information. The information is sold to debt collectors, private investigators, and anyone else who will pay the price.

The costs are not a great burden: $190 to uncover stock, bond, and mutual fund holdings; $450 to reveal a credit card number; between $80 and $200 to provide telephone records; $400 for access to ten years' medical history; and between $10 and $20 to buy a search involving a divorce, death claim, fictitious name, or bankruptcy.

If any details are missing, they can easily be filled in. A private investigator researching a claimant in a lawsuit against her employer "generated a five-page computer printout from her name alone" (Nina Bernstein, "On Line High-Tech Sleuths Find Private Facts," New York Times, September 15, 1997, A1). The private eye found her social security number, date of birth, every address where she had ever lived, the names and telephone numbers of past and present neighbors, the number of bedrooms in a house she had inherited, her welfare history, and the work histories of her children's fathers.

Violations of Medical Privacy

Some Americans may be indifferent about whether everyone knows their shoe or hat size, although they may discover that the size of their waistline may limit their employment opportunities. But few will react in such a nonchalant way when they discover that the privacy merchants violate their medical privacy with about the same impunity as with the rest of their private affairs. The following discussion focuses on medical privacy as a kind of domino-effect test case: If the forces that violate the privacy of our medical records cannot be stopped, they are unlikely to be stopped elsewhere.

The media often play up isolated cases of unauthorized use of medical information, in the tradition of individualizing our social problems and, at least inadvertently, distracting attention from their social sources. For instance, the press reported that a database the state of Maryland created in 1993 to keep its residents' medical records was used by a banker to call in the loans of his customers whom he discovered had cancer. The thirteen-year-old daughter of a nurse, while visiting her mother at the hospital where she worked, walked up to a computer terminal and accessed the hospital's online patient files. The girl then used the information to call female patients and tell them they were infected with HIV or were pregnant. After receiving such a call, one teenage victim tried to obtain her father's gun to commit suicide before being stopped by her family. A medical student in Colorado sold patients' medical records to malpractice lawyers who were looking for promising cases. When Nydia Velazquez was run ning for Congress in 1992 to represent New York City's Twelfth Congressional District, someone obtained hospital records detailing her 1991 suicide attempt and forwarded them to the press. The New York Post published the story, forcing Velazquez to acknowledge publicly something even her family did not know: She had once tried to kill herself with sleeping pills and vodka.