Can we curb the privacy invaders?

• Author: Spencer, Ray C.
• Position: Life In America

WHEN THE TIME CAME for John--the executive vice-president who had devoted his 20-year career to one of the nation's top Fortune 500 companies--to be appointed president, events took a surprising mm. The incumbent president was retiring in four months, and a committee of the board of directors had been designated to make the formal recommendation for his successor. John fully expected to be promoted to the position. To the shock of John and his colleagues, when the announcement was officially made, the selection turned out to be the second vice-president, a man with far fewer credentials and less time with the company.

All explanations by the board spokesman rang hollow, and John was determined to get the full story. He hired an attorney, who subpoenaed the files of the selection committee. Those files revealed a complete copy of his medical records maintained by his personal physician. In his physician's scrawled handwriting was the notation, "patient seems to have trouble managing his finances." The notation was made at a time when John was having persistent headaches and his doctor was probing all possible causes, including mental pressures.

John's case is not unique. Countless Americans have been denied credit, insurance, jobs, or other opportunities on the basis of inaccurate, irrelevant, or outdated information gathered haphazardly, stored in computers, and passed along from one organization to another.

Indeed, "the right to be let alone," as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said some 80 years ago, may still be "the right most valued by civilized men." To achieve that valued goal in our society, though, an individual would have to become a hermit, with no income, job, or fixed address. Accordingly, few of us would be willing to sacrifice our normal social and economic relationships for perfect privacy. To hold a job, receive medical care, be granted credit, buy insurance, and/or get an education, we must strike a series of bargains whereby we give up pieces of our personal privacy in exchange for society's benefits.

Today, we must examine these everyday exchanges and determine whether a new balance needs to be struck between the individual's right to keep his or her personal information private and the need of public and private institutions for personal information that helps them perform their functions.

Let us examine how our right to be left alone has been eroded over the years--and why the present and potential threats are so alarming. Our need for information grew along with the population explosion after World War II, which, in mm, caused an explosion of goods and services and the expansion of government's role in our private lives:

In 1950, total public aid expenditures were $2,500,000,000; by 1989, $127,500,000,000. In 1950, 651,000 Americans received payments through Aid to Families with Dependent Children; by 1991, 2,300,000,000 did. In 1949, 62,000,000 workers were covered under government social insurance programs; by 1990, 126,000,000 were.

The social consequences of these explosions have been profound. The growth of urbanization and an increasingly mobile population have depersonalized what were once face-to-face transactions. The small-town America of 60 years ago had little need for formal records. You knew whom you were lending money to or to whom you were selling equipment. Those personal encounters are being replaced by records that have assumed an ever-increasing importance as our country has moved from a cash to a credit economy. The combined result of all these forces has been an avalanche of paperwork, which, in turn, gave birth...