From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 95 01:59:17 PDT
To: Derek Bell <dbell@maths.tcd.ie>
Subject: Re: EU Data Protection
Message-ID: <199508120857.BAA11353@ix5.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>At 7:13 PM 8/11/95, Derek Bell wrote:
>>        I think you miss an important point; your opinion is subjective, but
>>data can relate to objective facts (e.g. credit records). Would you take the
>>same stance if a credit bureau claimed that you couldn't pay back half the
>>loans you took out?

There's a difference between what information you maintain for internal purposes
and what information you give to other people.  I don't really _care_ what
nonsense
a credit bureau may have in their internal records, only what they tell
other people
about me.  If they somehow think I'm a bankrupt Communist space alien, but
tell their
credit-rating customers that my credit looks ok, it's not my business.  
If they use their own internal records to decide that _they_ don't want to
lend me money,
well, somebody else will get my business; it's in their interest to be accurate.

A more interesting question is whether reporting credit transactions in private
communications with their data customers constitutes libel if they inaccurately
say bad things about me, and do I have a right to force them to tell me.
Tim May thinks this kind of forced speech violates the US Constitution;
I'm less bothered by laws telling corporations what to do (since corporations
are fictional creations of the state) than by laws telling human-owned
businesses
or individual humans what to do.

Tim May replies:
>Think about it: the name "data privacy" sounds good, at first blush, but
>what it really means is that my records are not private, that my records
>are inspectable by government agents to see if I have stored any illegal
>facts or correlations.

Yeah.  If you register your computer and its data with the Data Police,
they have the right to inspect it.  If you _don't register, that gives
them reasonable suspicion to believe that you might have "illegally
unregistered data" on the machine, so they have the power to inspect it.
Kind of like proving you're not a witch....
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
#---

Storyteller makes no choice - soon you will not hear his voice.
His job was to shed light, and not to master.      RIP, Jerry