Date: Sat, 28 Oct 95 11:10:07 EST Errors-To: Comp-privacy Error Handler From: Computer Privacy Digest Moderator To: Comp-privacy@uwm.edu Subject: Computer Privacy Digest V7#035 Computer Privacy Digest Sat, 28 Oct 95 Volume 7 : Issue: 035 Today's Topics: Moderator: Leonard P. Levine Re: Call Blocking Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Re: Copyright Notice Re: Copyright Notice Re: Voter Registration Records Resistance to Electronic Road Taxes Re: Inappropriate Access to Absentee Ballot Lists? Re: State Phone Policies Survey Stolen SSN -> fake credit card; real examples SSNs on Wanted Posters Re: Can you Sue if Credit is Denied for Lack of SSN? Re: The Information Rights Act of 1996 Info on CPD [unchanged since 08/18/95] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: les@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Les Earnest) Date: 26 Oct 1995 21:56:03 GMT Subject: Re: Call Blocking Organization: Stanford University, CA 94305, USA WELKER@a1.vsdec.nl.nuwc.navy.mil writes: The default behavior of the telephone company is to publish your number becuase most people want their numbers listed. Since the phone company has to do something special to "turn off" your listing, the cost of the additional labor can be passed on to you, not to mention cost of lost revenue from not being able to sell your name, which would otherwise show up on everybody's phone bill (a fact that the phone company will surely have reminded the UTC of). This argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny -- in fact there is practically no cost to "turn off" a listing. A more plausible argument that did apply at the time that those charges were initially applied was that unlisted numbers induce more calls to directory assistance, which costs the telephone company money. However, now that there are charges for directory assistance calls (or at least for those over a certain small number), there is no longer an excuse for charging a fee for an unlisted number. -- Les Earnest (les@cs.stanford.edu) Phone: 415 941-3984 Computer Science Dept.; Stanford, CA 94305 Fax: 415 941-3934 ------------------------------ From: crowdog@crosslink.net (Erik Rensberger) Date: 27 Oct 1995 03:27:38 GMT Subject: Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Organization: The_Squiredom [ Compilations of several Articles crossposted from alt.society.anarchy ] Want to see how many times your name has been in posts to this group? What the texts of those posts are? Who responded to you? How many times you posted to which groups? Check out http://dejanews.com/ and do a search of your own name! Text-only people: no graphics to not see, so go ahead and check it out. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The CIA and various other military agencys set up the internet. The problem they face now is how to control it. They know who we are anyway. The revolution wont be televised however. Peace and hemp justice - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ts cool! If I die today, I can still get my point of view across to people. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Shit, Della, you _had_ to go and hip everyone to these databases??? The one you mention is the second major publically accessible usenet database, and the implications suck. It's not searching one's _own_ name that has _me_ spooked... Now the world knows that you're a regular in alt.sex.fetish.bestio-pedo-necrophilia .... smart move.... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This may not be such a bad thing. On the net everyone is watching everyone else. When someone has something good to propagate they post it to the relevant groups and everyone can share in the newfound knowledge. You can find answers to questions, advice, and many, many people who my not know what's right but are compassionate and uderstanding and willing to listen to what you have to say. Many times that is enough to make things better. People worry about the information being misused but when someone posts some crap that may be harmfull there are many people who immediately step in and try to lay the facts out for each of us to decide for ourselves. So people aren't just seeing "how to make a bomb and startle your neighbors" they also hear how so and so tried it and blew his hand off. It is much easier to make intellegent decisions when we know all the facts. As a society of specialists we must work together and trust each other if we are to survive. ------------------------------ From: Jay@Mindspring.com (Jay Harrell) Date: 26 Oct 1995 18:36:33 -0400 Subject: Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology wrote: investigating *easily and efficiently* what areas of UseNet they inhabit. I've been following these discussions and I've taken a look at the DejaNews web site. In my opinion, this site is at worst a neutral thing. What DejaNews has done isn't particular difficult technically, and wouldn't cost a ton of money either. If somebody, _anybody_, wanted to collect this kind of data about people all they would need to get started is an ISP, a newsfeed, a less than $5000 computer, and some programming skill (or course, they would need a ton of storage space pretty quickly). What DejaNews has done is put the rest of us, who don't have the time or energy to collect the data ourselves, on more equal footing with others who might actually be motivated to collect this data. Big companies already have access to all kinds of sensitive data about individuals (credit reports and medical histories for example) and they keep this data away from us "little guys". I can't help but be in favor of something that gives the little guy access to exactly the same information that the big guys already have. (Gee, it sure would be nice if the next time I sell a used car, I could check the credit report of the guy who makes me an offer - just like the car dealers already do.) Now, you've turned UseNet into that small town where everyone knows everyone else's business. It's now infinitely easier to find out all kinds of information about people they normally wouldn't want the whole world knowing. I've seen basically this same sentiment several times and I don't really understand it. How in the world could anyone possibly expect something they post to be pseudo-anonymous when they put their name on it and have Usenet copy it all over the world for them. I've seen plenty of people flame away in Usenet forums - and I've run into those same people later in business and social setting where they seemed like regular normal people except I knew about a dark side they let show when they felt anonymous. Go figure. One more comment and then I'll go. Already, our society isn't nearly as anonymous as people think it is. While it may be next to impossible for an ordinary individual to easily track another specific individual's habits and movements, it is trivial for a government or criminal organization to do so. Most of what we do remains anonymous because no one _cares_ what you do. But my grandmother lives in a rural area and actually reads the legal notices in the local paper. She knows who all has refinanced their property, defaulted on loans, and all kinds of interesting little tidbits about people who she knows and sees a regualr basis. These are things that my friends don't tend to know about me because I live in a bigger city and frankly, they just don't care to know. I realize it's a hell of a lot easier to track stuff down when it's computerized and on the Internet, but really I think that the answer here is for people to not post what they don't want others to read. -- Jay Harrell Alanta Georgia ------------------------------ From: pshriner@csn.org (Peter Shriner) Date: 26 Oct 1995 20:56:21 -0700 Subject: Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Organization: Rocky Mountain Internet Inc. "Bill McClatchie" wrote: And the profile could show someone as posting to groups like the alt.pedophilia.* groups, and quite possibly they won't have the article you followed up to which had a "unusual" follow-up line. Something like that ought to look good on a quick check of what you do online. Of course they aren't doing it now ;-), but consider what governments, law enforcement agencies, corporate security depts., human resources depts., etc. might do with their own version of dejanews. And why not? Everyone's posts are publicly available. I've heard it said that posting to UseNet is like standing in the town square with a bullhorn, telling all the world what you think. When I go to post something, my newsreader displays the following message: "This machine posts news to thousands (now millions?) of machines throughout the civilized world. Please be sure you know what you are doing." Forget the privacy lawsuits against services like DejaNews - it's better to think a little before one's fingers starting wandering across the keyboard. With the ability to say something comes the responsibility _not_ to say it. ------------------------------ From: mikeb@ssd.fsi.com (Mike Bates) Date: 27 Oct 1995 10:44:12 -0500 Subject: Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Organization: FlightSafety-SSD, Tulsa, OK, USA "Bill McClatchie" writes: And the profile could show someone as posting to groups like the alt.pedophilia.* groups, and quite possibly they won't have the article you followed up to which had a "unusual" follow-up line. Something like that ought to look good on a quick check of what you do online. For what it's worth, Deja News doesn't archive alt.*, soc.*, talk.*, or any of the binaries groups. At first I thought this was odd, perhaps just a strategy to eliminate junk from the database. It also provides a way for eliminating most of the controversial groups from the database and from an author's profile. There is a flaw in the way they present profiles, however. My profile, on another account, looks like this: * 5 articles posted between 1995/07/04 and 1995/08/30. * 60% followups. * Number of articles posted to individual newsgroups: + 3 rec.travel.europe + 1 soc.culture.irish + 1 soc.culture.british So two soc.* groups show up in my profile. (I've posted a lot more articles to soc.culture.irish, none of them crossposted, so they don't show up.) It turns out that Deja News only tallies the first group in the newsgroups line and doesn't filter for alt, soc, talk, or binaries. The newsgroups line for the soc.culture.british posting (which was a follow-up) looks like this: newsgroups: soc.culture.british,soc.history,rec.music.celtic,soc.culture.irish, soc.culture.scottish The soc.culture.irish posting was crossposted (by me) to rec.travel.europe. In my case, no real harm done, but here's a scenario. Someone trolls rec.pets.cats with "101 things to do with a dead cat" and sets followups to alt.pedophilia and rec.pets.cats, with alt.pedophilia appearing at the beginning of the newsgroups line. Yes, we all ought to be careful, but it's easy to get burned, especially if you're new to the net and have lousy news software. My suggestion to Deja News is that they use their newsgroups filter on the newsgroups line when compiling the user profile. This would prevent this kind of blind-siding. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mike Bates FlightSafety International, Simulation Systems Div. Principal Engineer 2700 North Hemlock Circle Computer Systems Group Broken Arrow, Oklahoma 74012 mikeb@ssd.fsi.com 918-251-0500 ext. 598 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ From: miller@cs.rochester.edu (Brad Miller) Date: 27 Oct 1995 13:36:36 -0400 Subject: Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science "David H. Klein" wrote: On the issue of privacy in the Newsgroups, IMHO, the service such as Dejanews was bound to happen. I agree with it. I'm glad someone came forward and said this. I do too. One of the problems in "society", IMHO, is the lack of responsibility for one's own actions. If you can't feel responsible for something you put your own name on, then the rest of us deserve to know that about you. Is forgery a potential problem? Sure, but if you respond to the forgery (and now you know where to look to find out if there's been a forgery to a group you don't read, in your name), that'll be indexed too. And all these things have to be taken with a grain (or a cow-lick :-) of salt. Just because someone is a frequent contributor to alt.howto.cook.kids doesn't make their arguments in comp.unix.wizards more or less plausible. (If you don't buy that, I suggest finding a good book on fallacious argumentation techniques). When you post something, there may be expectation of copyright, to the extent the article goes beyond the usenet system, but there is certainly no expectation of *privacy*; you do not post to a restricted set of readers, you post to anyone who happens to read the newsgroup, suscribe to a clipping service, or (now), use services like Dejanews. Confusing this with **real** privacy issues, like information you have to give your doctor for him to make a diagnosis, just clouds the issue of what is private and what is public. If you don't want something potentially read by everyone on the planet, don't post news! -- Brad Miller miller@cs.rochester.edu Computer Science Dept http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/miller/ University of Rochester (716) 275-1118 (v) 461-2018 (f) Rochester, NY 14627-0226 ------------------------------ From: "Prof. L. P. Levine" Date: 27 Oct 1995 15:18:02 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Re: Author Profiles at Deja News Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee "Bill McClatchie" wrote: And the profile could show someone as posting to groups like the alt.pedophilia.* groups, and quite possibly they won't have the article you followed up to which had a "unusual" follow-up line. Something like that ought to look good on a quick check of what you do online. I feel the service is a good add-on to the internet. It gives a service to the rest of us that is already available to the most wealthy of us. Not only is it a useful service for those of us who cannot keep our own massive archives but it serves as a good teaching tool to those that somehow are unaware of the lack of privacy that occurs during posting. One difficulty is this: How sure are we that the postings that are attributed to us are ours and how sure are we that our postings are all listed? Who becomes sueable (able to be sued) when there is an error in the database, of either of these two kinds? Finally, I hope that the owner of the database is prepared to accept correction lists from us posters that we can use to fix the errors that have crept into the database. Even Equif*x and services like that have been ordered to post corrections when a user presents them, I am sure that dejanews will do the same, right? :-) -- Leonard P. Levine e-mail levine@cs.uwm.edu Professor, Computer Science Office 1-414-229-5170 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Fax 1-414-229-6958 Box 784, Milwaukee, WI 53201 PGP Public Key: finger llevine@blatz.cs.uwm.edu ------------------------------ From: les@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Les Earnest) Date: 26 Oct 1995 22:52:43 GMT Subject: Re: Copyright Notice Organization: Stanford University, CA 94305, USA Peter da Silva writes: The right to make copies is automatically reserved to the author. You don't have to assert it to retain copyright. My understanding of the copyright law is different -- that the copyright belongs to the person who first puts "copyrightable" material in a permanent form, such as a paper copy or a magnetic recording. Simply posting an article on Usenet does not meet this standard. An example from another situation is human speech -- you can't copyright spoken words, but you can copyright either a printed version of a speech or a recording of it. (However, I'm not a lawyer, so don't act without consulting one.) Submitting a copyrighted posting to an electronic newsgroup is an oxymoron as it causes the copying of the document very widely and quickly causes the author to lose control over just what he has officially reserved. When you submit a document to a newsgroup, you are requesting that copies be made under the normal Usenet distribution mechanisms. Copyright in the document and responsibility for its contents remains with the author, oherwise nobody could afford the liability involved in carrying Usenet! Nonsequitur! First, the copyright for this material will belong to the first entity that makes a recording of it, which will probably not be the author. Second, there is no agreement about what the "normal Usenet distribution mechanisms" are, so if you take seriously the idea that Usenet material is copyrighted and you also note that the copyright holder (whoever that is) has not given explicit permission to copy, then we are all in violation of the law and have been for years. I hope that the Congress and courts will address this issue and clarify our rights and obligations some time soon. As things stand, I believe, the status of copyright in electronic media is rather ambiguous. To claim that one is giving up that copyright by posting, would be to claim that George Lucas (or Paramount, or whoever holds it these days) gave up the copyright to Star Wars when it was broadcast on TV. No. Lucas first put Star Wars in the form of film, which was copyrighted, so he owns it. -- Les Earnest (les@cs.stanford.edu) Phone: 415 941-3984 Computer Science Dept.; Stanford, CA 94305 Fax: 415 941-3934 ------------------------------ From: JF_Brown@pnl.gov (Jeff Brown) Date: 28 Oct 1995 00:03:45 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: Copyright Notice Organization: Battelle Pacific Northwest Labs levine@blatz.cs.uwm.edu says... Copyright is a reservation to yourself of the right to make copies. Submitting a copyrighted posting to an electronic newsgroup is an oxymoron as it causes the copying of the document very widely and quickly causes the author to lose control over just what he has officially reserved. I think that considering copyrighted posting to a newsgroup an oxymoron is equivalent to shooting the victim. We are ethically bound to respect the copyrights of others. If we do not, we are either acting unethically or at best are ignorant of of our laws and societal standards of behavior. Thus, an author should be able to post material, and be aware of the risk, without giving up control. -- Jeff Brown JF_Brown@Pnl.gov ------------------------------ From: Robert Gellman Date: 27 Oct 1995 10:07:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Voter Registration Records There has been some discussion here about access to voter records. I just thought that I would contribute a few facts to help clarify the situation. Access to voter registration lists varies considerably among the fifty states. About half restrict access to or use of voter registration records. California is a restrictive state, allowing disclosure to candidates, to researchers, and to a few others. Pennsylvania permits public inspection but prohibits use for "commercial or improper purposes." Oklahoma and South Carolina have unrestricted voter rolls. Even in states with restrictions, access to political parties or candidates is typically permitted. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Robert Gellman rgellman@cais.com + + Privacy and Information Policy Consultant + + 431 Fifth Street S.E. + + Washington, DC 20003 + + 202-543-7923 (phone) 202-547-8287 (fax) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ------------------------------ From: Phil Agre Date: 27 Oct 1995 11:15:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Resistance to Electronic Road Taxes A newspaper article in the UK describes a report on the possibility of public resistance to road use taxes ("tolls") implemented using electronic systems for (though the article does not use this particular term) "automatic vehicle identification": Jonathan Prynn, Road tolls "could be another poll tax", The Times (London), 2 October 1995, page 4. It quotes the report, issued by the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank closely associated with Britain's governing Conservative Party, as asserting: If electronic tolling is not seen as fair, there is a very real risk of civil disobedience. ... Many motorists might decide simply to ignore the law and drive on motorways without paying tolls. The Government would be quickly overwhelmed by the number of violations and could have no choice but to abandon the system. The experience of the poll tax might not be entirely irrelevant. This last sentence is a reference to the massive public resistance to the "poll tax", officially known as the "community charge", an extremely unpopular per capita tax instituted by the Thatcher government around 1990. I was living in the UK at this time and was most impressed; resistance to the tax was highly organized and drew on centuries of cultural memory of popular resistance to unfair taxes. (Thus the term "poll tax".) But resistance to electronic road use taxes has occurred elsewhere. Citizen councils and professional societies in Hong Kong rejected such a "congestion pricing" scheme in the 1980's, citizens in Washington State are currently waging an effective campaign against similar proposals there, and a so-called "Citizens Jury" in Minneapolis recently came out strongly against the idea in that area. The pattern is pretty common: concerns over unfair or excessive taxation rank highest in citizens' minds, but as the issue unfolds they learn more and become more concerned about the serious privacy issues associated with such systems. The CPS report, for example, proposes that the Government maintain databases listing every road user in the country as either a "low" or "high" road user, keeping track of everybody's travels and issuing bills to "low-use" drivers who exceed a certain limit. Unlike electronic automation of existing toll collection systems, participation in these proposed schemes is effectively mandatory because it would be impractical to pay all of the new tolls with cash. The effect is to create the technical means to track the movements on public highways of practically everbody in the country. The article states: This [system of registering low and high users] would be policed by a network of roadside cameras linked by microprocessor to a hard disc list of high-use vehicles. Such proposals are going forward in one fashion or another throughout nearly the whole of the industrialized world, and it is crucial that a proper public debate take place on them before they provoke massive public resistance -- or, much worse, before they progress so far that resistance becomes futile. The solution to the civil liberties problems, as pointed out in an article in the October 2nd US News and World Report, is for these systems to employ technologies such as digital cash that prevent the capture of individually identifiable information about citizens' movements. Technology is not going to solve the taxation problem, but all of these systems embody choices that ought to be made through proper public debate, not the back-room fiat that is now the norm. -- Phil Agre ------------------------------ From: cwarack@kirk.usafa.af.mil (Chris Warack ) Date: 27 Oct 1995 20:32:49 GMT Subject: Re: Inappropriate Access to Absentee Ballot Lists? Organization: USAFA Dept of Computer Science "Dennis G. Rears" writes: Steve Rose writes: I live in Seattle, Washington. I just got a mailing from a candidate named Richard B. Sanders encouraging me to: "Mark your absentee ballot today..." I found this, shall we say, interesting, considering I also happened to get an absentee ballot this same day. This mailing was clearly addressed: "Attention Absentee Voter" and my next door neighbor, who had not ordered an absentee ballot, didn't get the same mailing. I would bet that Mr. Sanders doesn't even see this as a government/privacy issue. Candidates have always gone to the voting records. Why else do only democrats get democratic primary mailings and republicans republican maillings. When a process has always been done a certain way very few if any look at process. It's not right but it is human nature. I'm not sure this is not right. As a long time absentee voter (active duty military) I think about the process quite a bit. I'm 1000 miles away from where I vote. I don't see local TV, I don't get a local paper. I have two sources of information about state/local issues: 1) relatives in the area, and 2) election mailings... If addresses weren't available for any voter, I'd say absentee voter addresses should be available to candidates, etc. It's the only way many absentee voters can get information about the topics they should vote on. Even with the mailings, my family and I find we abstain on a lot of issues. BTW, what is worse that people have access to these records or the junk mail they send? I have problems with the access but I wonder what is the worse evil, lack of accoutability of voting records or lack of privacy of records. If it is the junk mail, even if the access was denied they would probably end up junk mailing everyone. Either way we lose. One man's junk mail is another man's only source of info. :-) -- Christopher A. Warack, Capt, USAF cwarack@cs.usafa.af.mil (719) 472-2401 Computer Science Department, US Air Force Academy STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This content in no way reflects the opinions, standards, or policy of the USAF Academy, or the US government. ------------------------------ From: wrf@ecse.rpi.edu (Wm. Randolph U Franklin) Date: 27 Oct 1995 21:08:55 GMT Subject: Re: State Phone Policies Survey Organization: ECSE Dept, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180 USA prvtctzn@aol.com (Prvt Ctzn) writes: Illinois, Chicago metro are, is covered by Ameritech. Charges are as follows: To stay out of the telephone book = $0.97/month To stay out of the book and Directory Assistance = $1.45/month To get the names and phone number of those paying Ameritech up to $17.40 / year to keep thier numbers private = $9.00 month This reminds me of the book, "The Arms of Krupp". Krupp, the large German arms company, would sell bigger and bigger guns and armor to both sides of a war. In fact during WWI, Vickers, the British arms company used a licensed Krupp shell fuse against German soldiers, who were firing Krupp guns at the British. After WWI, Krupp used the number of dead Germans to estimate how many licensed shells Vickers had fired, and submitted a bill. Vickers paid part of it. -- Wm. Randolph Franklin, wrf@ecse.rpi.edu, (518) 276-6077; Fax: -6261 ECSE Dept., 6026 JEC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst, Troy NY, 12180 USA ------------------------------ From: wrf@ecse.rpi.edu (Wm. Randolph U Franklin) Date: 27 Oct 1995 23:03:47 GMT Subject: Stolen SSN -> fake credit card; real examples Organization: ECSE Dept, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180 USA This one is for the people who don't think that it hurts to let your SSN be public. It is from the Albany Times Union, Wed Oct 25, page B-4, POLICE BLOTTER: Bethlehem, 2:23 pm. IMPERSONATION: Someone used complainant's son's name and SSN to obtain a MC/V card from Citibank... When the application was checked, fraud was discovered. Victim also learned the same person illegally used his SSN to get a Discovery card.... ------------------------ Wm. Randolph Franklin, wrf@ecse.rpi.edu, (518) 276-6077; Fax: -6261 ECSE Dept., 6026 JEC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst, Troy NY, 12180 USA ------------------------------ From: sean@sdg.dra.com (Sean Donelan) Date: 28 Oct 95 01:40:36 CDT Subject: SSNs on Wanted Posters Organization: Data Research Associates, St. Louis MO "Dennis G. Rears" writes: estate transactions. Never make the FBI fugitive list, on the wanted posters they publish the SSN of the criminal. Is that an invasion of privacy? The FBI doesn't publish the SSN of the criminal (wanted person, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law etc). The FBI publishes the SSN(s) reportly used by the wanted person. The published SSN(s) may or may not be the same SSN assigned to the person by the Social Security Administration. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation ------------------------------ From: JF_Brown@pnl.gov (Jeff Brown) Date: 28 Oct 1995 00:06:37 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: Can you Sue if Credit is Denied for Lack of SSN? Organization: Battelle Pacific Northwest Labs straurig@mailgw.sanders.lockheed.com says... A few people misunderstood the question. They thought the bank was paying *me* interest, and needed my SSN for tax reporting purposes, as opposed to a credit account where I pay the *bank* interest. At any rate, the general consensus was, no, I could not sue for this reason, as companies can do business with whomever they like, aside from such issues as race, religion, etc. I once had this problem. I talked it over with the Credit Manager. It came down to this: if they could verify my creditworthiness without the number, they would grant credit, otherwise not. They were able to by using my name and address, and so did grant credit. Moral: you may have to bump the problem up in the bank's chain of management. Do they want your business? -- Jeff Brown JF_Brown@pnl.gov ------------------------------ From: tye@metronet.com (Tye McQueen) Date: 28 Oct 1995 02:57:30 -0500 Subject: Re: The Information Rights Act of 1996 Organization: Texas Metronet, Inc (login info (214/705-2901 - 817/571-0400)) I feel that I should own all the information about me. For anyone to publicly give out information about me, no matter how they came by it, they need to ask my permission. That would be a good law! rj.mills@pti-us.com (Dick Mills) writes: 1) Information is either public or private. The net especially has been contributing to lack of clarity and confession by failing to make this distinction. This week's furor over the Deja News service is a good example. "I want to post on the thousands of people who read the UseNet group but that doesn't mean I want the whole world to know. Not my employer, not my parents." Get real. I happen to know that my employer and my parents don't read alt.sex.beastiality.marketing, otherwise I wouldn't have posted there. If all there is is "completely public" and "completely private", then I must either hide in a cave or expect Bob Saggat to widely broadcast videos of every embarrassing thing I ever do in public. Yes, I want to contribute to the global Usenet community. And, no, I don't want to be tracked, categorized, and recorded in a database. Just like, yes, I want to walk in public and, no, I don't want anyone handing out pictures of me tripping on the curb. -- Tye McQueen tye@metronet.com || tye@doober.usu.edu Nothing is obvious unless you are overlooking something http://www.metronet.com/~tye/ (scripts, links, nothing fancy) ------------------------------ From: "Prof. L. P. Levine" Date: 18 Oct 1995 13:55:25 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Info on CPD [unchanged since 08/18/95] Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The Computer Privacy Digest is a forum for discussion on the effect of technology on privacy or vice versa. The digest is moderated and gatewayed into the USENET newsgroup comp.society.privacy (Moderated). Submissions should be sent to comp-privacy@uwm.edu and administrative requests to comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu. This digest is a forum with information contributed via Internet eMail. Those who understand the technology also understand the ease of forgery in this very free medium. Statements, therefore, should be taken with a grain of salt and it should be clear that the actual contributor might not be the person whose email address is posted at the top. Any user who openly wishes to post anonymously should inform the moderator at the beginning of the posting. He will comply. If you read this from the comp.society.privacy newsgroup and wish to contribute a message, you should simply post your contribution. As a moderated newsgroup, attempts to post to the group are normally turned into eMail to the submission address below. On the other hand, if you read the digest eMailed to you, you generally need only use the Reply feature of your mailer to contribute. If you do so, it is best to modify the "Subject:" line of your mailing. Contributions to CPD should be submitted, with appropriate, substantive SUBJECT: line, otherwise they may be ignored. They must be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, cogent, coherent, concise, and nonrepetitious. Diversity is welcome, but not personal attacks. Do not include entire previous messages in responses to them. Include your name & legitimate Internet FROM: address, especially from .UUCP and .BITNET folks. Anonymized mail is not accepted. All contributions considered as personal comments; usual disclaimers apply. All reuses of CPD material should respect stated copyright notices, and should cite the sources explicitly; as a courtesy; publications using CPD material should obtain permission from the contributors. [new: Ordinary copyrighted material should not be submitted. If a] [copyright owner wishes to make material available for electronic] [distribution then a message such as "Copyright 1988 John Doe.] [Permission to distribute free electronic copies is hereby granted but] [printed copy or copy distributed for financial gain is forbidden" would] [be appropriate.] Contributions generally are acknowledged within 24 hours of submission. If selected, they are printed within two or three days. The moderator reserves the right to delete extraneous quoted material. He may change the Subject: line of an article in order to make it easier for the reader to follow a discussion. He will not, however, alter or edit the text except for purely technical reasons. A library of back issues is available on ftp.cs.uwm.edu [129.89.9.18]. Login as "ftp" with password identifying yourid@yoursite. The archives are in the directory "pub/comp-privacy". People with gopher capability can most easily access the library at gopher.cs.uwm.edu. Web browsers will find it at gopher://gopher.cs.uwm.edu. ---------------------------------+----------------------------------------- Leonard P. Levine | Moderator of: Computer Privacy Digest Professor of Computer Science | and comp.society.privacy University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Post: comp-privacy@uwm.edu Box 784, Milwaukee WI 53201 | Information: comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu | Gopher: gopher.cs.uwm.edu levine@cs.uwm.edu | Web: gopher://gopher.cs.uwm.edu ---------------------------------+----------------------------------------- ------------------------------ End of Computer Privacy Digest V7 #035 ****************************** .