Date: Tue, 10 Aug 93 16:37:46 EST Errors-To: Comp-privacy Error Handler From: Computer Privacy Digest Moderator To: Comp-privacy@PICA.ARMY.MIL Subject: Computer Privacy Digest V3#012 Computer Privacy Digest Tue, 10 Aug 93 Volume 3 : Issue: 012 Today's Topics: Moderator: Dennis G. Rears First Person broadcast on privacy Re: First Person broadcast on privacy Re: Disparate policies (was "Re: First Person broadcast on privacy") Digital Cellular - was Re: First Person broadcast on privacy re: ELECTRONIC MATCHMAKER Re: Email Policy Give America Online a break... Social Security numbers The Computer Privacy Digest is a forum for discussion on the effect of technology on privacy. The digest is moderated and gatewayed into the USENET newsgroup comp.society.privacy (Moderated). Submissions should be sent to comp-privacy@pica.army.mil and administrative requests to comp-privacy-request@pica.army.mil. Back issues are available via anonymous ftp on ftp.pica.army.mil [129.139.160.133]. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 08 Aug 1993 01:00:46 -0700 From: henry mensch Subject: First Person broadcast on privacy >From: "Wm. L. Ranck" >John Higdon (john@zygot.ati.com) wrote: >: For me, a pager is freedom. The alternative would be to be constantly >: forwarding my phone to locations all over town or to my cellular phone. >: I could forget social activities that would take me out of the reach of >: telephones such as concerts and picnics. You see, I am on twenty-four >: hour call. If any one of number of radio stations were to go off the > >Like I said, some people have a business use for pagers and faxes. But, >the original post was about someone who had been laid off from his job >and "had to scramble" to keep access to pager, fax, and e-mail. He >didn't need them for his job anymore he just thought he needed them for >his personal communications. And, I think that's absurd. how nice for you. i use my home fax more than i ever use my office fax; i have friends all around the world, and fax is the easiest and fastest way to get stuff to them; all i do is fire up microsoft word, write up a fax cover page (and attach the appropriate other bits, if necessary), and print to the fax. no one-week delays for "air mail" to europe or australia, and no outrageous charges for overnight services that don't quite work well overseas. ditto for paging and cell phone service: my pager keeps me from being a slave to my home phone. my friends can find me when they want to arrange a dinner expedition. what's so absurd about this? > .... If you didn't need your pager for >your on call status would you still feel a need to carry it around? absolutely. # henry mensch / / pob 14592; sf, ca 94114-0592; usa # "on the internet, nobody knows you're a bear." --tovah hollander ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 22:41:05 GMT Subject: Re: First Person broadcast on privacy Organization: Electronic Birdwatching Society From: Bill Stewart In article Dorothy Klein writes: The sticking point is that the person [...] had specifically asked about security, had been told of COURSE nobody could or would read e-mail, and to go ahead and tell everyone they could use the e-mail and feel secure. She later tripped over a pile of e-mail printouts, with one of hers on the top, in her boss's office, and was told it was none of her business -- shortly before Epson fired her. Epson fired her on 15 minutes' notice, and someone saying they were at Epson called the local 911 number while she was cleaning out her desk saying that she was violent, irrational, and had a gun (and gave her full name) -- Hmmm - that's rather a different case from the generic problem. If they told her they had a pro-privacy policy, and in fact had an anti-privacy policy, that's rather fraudulent; telling the police she was violent, irrational, and armed is outright slander, and probably endangering her, given police's normal response to armed, violent, irrational people (unless, of course, she *was* armed and violent, which probably would have been mentioned on the tube if true.) -- # Pray for peace; Bill # Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ # White House Comment Line 1-202-456-1111 fax 1-202-456-2461 # ROT-13 public key available upon request ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 22:30:33 GMT Subject: Re: Disparate policies (was "Re: First Person broadcast on privacy") Organization: Electronic Birdwatching Society From: Bill Stewart In article Todd Jonz writes: In my experience it's very likely that companies don't really have formal, published policies on a lot of these issues. I think that's getting close to the guts of the problem. How much privacy you have at work, like how much money you make, or whether your office has real walls or just partitions, or whether they trust your judgement in what drugs to take on weekends, is a negotiable issue. If you haven't negotiated it, either explicitly or by not refusing to accept a published policy, then you and your employer are going on matters of implied contracts, and you may have different expectations that you've got to work out somehow. Personally, I'd prefer to work at an employer that respects my privacy, and treats me like a professional, though I can understand occasional cases where that doesn't apply (handling highly classified information). But if there isn't a pre-arranged agreement, in general I don't think either side has a strong position for taking it to court. Eavesdropping on employees is unprofessional scumminess, like drug testing is, but if everybody sued everyone they though was unprofessional or scummy, we'd never get *anything* done :-) -- # Pray for peace; Bill # Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ # White House Comment Line 1-202-456-1111 fax 1-202-456-2461 # ROT-13 public key available upon request ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 23:00:52 GMT From: Bill Stewart Subject: Digital Cellular - was Re: First Person broadcast on privacy Organization: The Big Phone Company In article Christopher Zguris <0004854540@mcimail.com> writes: As far as encryption, I didn't realize digital cellular necessarily meant encryption (I may very well be dead wrong here, I'm not that familiar with digital cellular)- I thought it simply meant digitizing the audio using simple analog-to-digital techniques. The theory being your average joe with his receiver would only hear gibberish. Digital cellular doesn't inherently require encryption - but privacy is a real concern in the cellular market, and digitized voice can easily be encrypted at minimal cost, so the digital cellular providers want to provide it; the main real delay is because the government objects to the public using strong encryption, and makes export of it illegal. Simple digitization provides some privacy, at least until digital transmitters become sufficiently widespread that digital receivers do also; it's not hard to convince an analog cellular phone to listen to other calls, and it wouldn't be hard for simple digital cellular phones either. Spread-spectrum techniques substantially increase privacy, though their real value is reducing interference and power requirements, but it's still eavesdroppable. Spread-spectrum cordless phones are just coming out on the market, though I'm not sure I'd be willing to give out my credit card number on one of them... -- # Pray for peace; Bill # Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ # White House Comment Line 1-202-456-1111 fax 1-202-456-2461 # ROT-13 public key available upon request ------------------------------ From: Paul Gribble Subject: re: ELECTRONIC MATCHMAKER Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 00:29:51 GMT Organization: ATR Human Information Processing Laboratory someone wrote: ...free? there must be a catch... think about it - you fill out and send in this questionnaire, which involves answering many many many detailed questions about qualities about you, and qualities you like in others... plus things like income, job description, living arrangements, relationship history, etc... basically it's a shit-load of demographic information... just think about how much demographic information about the whole WORLD that they could gather if only a handful of people at every internet site replied to their questionnaire! Now I have no idea if they are using all this information for anything other than what they claim they are using it for... I'm just making the point that they _have_ this information when you fill out the questionnaire. ------------------------------ From: Bernie Cosell Subject: Re: Email Policy Reply-To: cosell@world.std.com Organization: Fantasy Farm Fibers Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 03:58:35 GMT In article , "Glenn S. Tenney" writes: } On 03 Aug 93 17:57:14 EDT William Hugh Murray <75126.1722@compuserve.com> said: } } > 7. Policy should always reserve some right for management to } > look at the contents of the communications in order to } > preserve necessary options and to protect management when } > some manager or management surrogate acts at or beyond the } > limits of his authority. } } and many other things relating to consistent rules for all forms of } communications... } } The last time I spoke with the USPS about mail addressed to people at a } business address I was told that the rules were very clear: If a letter is } addressed to someone at a company, it belongs to the receiving company. } However, if a letter indicates that it is 'personal', then it belongs to } the person to whom it is addressed rather than to to the company. Ah, good... I've been asking about this and I'm glad to see that the USPS policy is the reasonable one to expect. I assume, of course, the an employer who chooses *NOT* provide a private, personal, delivery channel can refuse mail marked "personal", yes? } I should think that a similar exception must apply for other forms of } communications. If the subject line of an email message says 'personal', } then the company is on notice that it is NOT work related and they should } not be looking at it. And, similarly here: I assume that it would be OK for the employer to have their SMTP mail daemon refuse to deliver mail so-marked. } ... The company might wish to have a policy against } non-business communications, but that is impossible to enforce for the } receipt of unsolicited communications. Not true at all. As you've just said: the *presumption* is that it is business unless clearly marked otherwise. So unsolicited or not: if it arrives at the company's 'portal', be it electronic or mail-room, if it is not "marked" it is presumed to be business and the employer can do with it as they wish; if it _is_ "marked", then it can simply be refused. I don't see either the ambiguity or the difficulty in a policy like this... /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell cosell@world.std.com Fantasy Farm Fibers, Pearisburg, VA (703) 921-2358 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 08:35:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Dave Ptasnik Subject: Give America Online a break... If America Online wants to be the Disney channel of dial up services, let them. I imagine that parents are glad that their kids have a means of expressing themselves through writing. Not only will it improve typing skills, but frequent bad manners, spelling, or grammer is probably flamed, improving those areas as well. At the same time it is probably a relief that younger viewers have a (relatively) safe place to exercise their talents, free of adult material for which there are plenty of other forums. There is plenty of space in the marketplace for all sorts of vendors. If you don't like their policies, go to some other service, there are plenty of them around. Like they say, just change the channel. All of the above is nothing more than the personal opinion of - Dave Ptasnik davep@u.washington.edu ------------------------------ Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.privacy,comp.society.privacy From: sbloch@ms.uky.edu (Stephen Bloch) Subject: Social Security numbers Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1993 01:04:12 GMT This may be an FAQ on at least one of these groups, but I've been wondering... Paperwork from U.S. Federal and State agencies often has a notice explaining on what grounds they're asking for your social security number. I've heard that when the Social Security Act was first passed in the 1930's Congress was worried enough about privacy to attach a rider to the effect that "the social security number may not be required as identification except for tax purposes" or something like that, and that any organization that DID choose to use it for identification not related to taxes was required to offer alternate identification numbers upon demand. Can somebody who KNOWS answer the following questions: 1) Who is allowed to demand my Social Security number, and for what purposes? I'm curious about both governmental and non-governmental organizations. 2) Is there any penalty for violation of this law, i.e. for withholding benefits, memberships, etc. on sole grounds of refusal to give a Social Security number? 3) Is there a government publication stating this? Thank you, -- Stephen Bloch sbloch@s.ms.uky.edu ------------------------------ End of Computer Privacy Digest V3 #012 ******************************