Private matters.

• Position: Brief Article

NEW RULEBOOK GOVERNS MARKETPLACE

IF YOU ARE ANYTHING LIKE ME, YOU RECEIVED A FLURRY OF snail mail in late June from insurers, banks, credit-card issuers and any similar financial institution you use.

If you are like me, you ripped open the envelope, saw the words "privacy policy," and tossed the mailing into a desk drawer or maybe even the circular file. If you are like me, you didn't realize that the mail was required by law.

But if you are not like me, and you own your own business, you had better pay some belated attention to those mailings.

I learned about the new laws at a June 19 breakfast seminar hosted by the Denver office of Hogan & Hartson, a nationwide law firm. Four lawyers talked to about 150 people who were involved in running various businesses.

Three of the four lawyers were from Hogan & Hartson's Washington office, and had previously served as government regulators in a variety of federal agencies, mostly during the Clinton administration.

Christine Varney, who sat on the Federal Trade Commission for three years, told the audience that she and the other lawyers were among the authors of the privacy regs, which dictate how businesses must protect private information they receive from customers during the course of a transaction.

Then, realizing she was talking to an audience that would naturally abhor added government regulation and before saying much more, she apologized.

"Our goal," she said about writing the new rules, "was not to put you out of business or to make your lives more difficult." Instead, the lawyers were trying to write rules to govern a marketplace -- especially the Internet -- where no rules existed.

Marketplaces where private and public companies were gathering "a massive amount of data" about individuals, but where market forces weren't controlling the way the companies could use that information. They could sell it, for instance, or use it to cross-market other products.

Varney pointed out that before the Internet, if you wanted to find out something about somebody that was public information but of a personal nature, you had to go to a federal or county courthouse, pull the records, copy them, and only then begin to absorb them. Nowadays, on a computer, with only an address of a friend or relative, you can find out enough about anybody to stalk someone if you wish. No one was regulating the information that computers automatically gather on people, and that's a concern for all of us.

But when a lawyer...