Privacy for Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone's Private Life an Open Secret.

• Author: Beard, Elliott

Privacy For Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone's Private Life an Open Secret. Jeffrey Rothfeder. Simon & Schuster, $22. Most of the anecdotes presented in this book have been carefully chosen to scare you witless: You could be the elderly cancer patient who discovers that a malicious Harlem resident has found a way to run up huge bills on your credit cards, or the perfectly healthy man who's denied medical insurance because a faceless, misguided supercomputer thinks you have AIDS. Jeffrey Rothfeder, who first began to investigate the subject of computer data-record surveillance as an editor at Business Week, has set out to expose the shadowy world of megadatabases, technospying devices, and international information exchange. Much of what he has to tell is frightening indeed.

The issue of privacy looks as though it's going to be a big one in the next few years, and justifiably so. The thesis of this wide-ranging--if somewhat paranoid--survey is that our country needs new laws to protect its citizens' privacy against the now-overwhelming powers of computers and other technology. Credit bureaus, insurance companies, and government agencies are more capable than ever of keeping and retrieving information about you. Computer records--medical, credit, bank, tax, what have yon-- have proliferated in scope and accessibility. And if you, sensibly, have a hard time trusting the legitimate institutions that make those records, you should really be womed about the marketing agents and con artists who can access those same private files.

But we should be careful to choose the correct problems to address: Are we worried about privacy for its intrinsic value to us as individuals and members of a society or are we worried simply about the effects invasions of privacy can have upon us? The question is an important one that's not really asked in this book, and many of the privacy issues with which Rothfeder concerns himself have long existed--they've only been exacerbated by machines. This makes solving the problems themselves wiser than trying to legislate them back to the precomputer age.

For instance, Rothfeder makes a big deal out of direct-marl companies that now use database profiles to target different neighborhoods for special deals and offers, like the store in a littie town in Georgia that placed ads for credit and discounts only in the newspapers delivered to the rich end of town, He picks his example shrewdly --we are obviously supposed...