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Privacy in the Digital Age
March 31, 1994
Originally published in New Media Magazine(First published in the April 94 issue of New Media)
Welcome to the digital frontier, where network by network, metaphor by metaphor, a splendid, global, multimedia palace is being built through trial and error. You won't need to take a long and winding road to this frontier, though, it's coming soon to your home. You'll know it has arrived when you can read messages on your telephone, have a dialogue with your television and watch beautiful movies on your PC.
 AT&T has already established a giant encampment on this digital frontier, and it is now concentrating on building a virtual community. In advertisements, the company paints seductive pictures of fully wired--and wireless--consumers interacting in the cyberspace equivalent of Hemingway's clean, well-lighted place. A happy couple in a jumbo kitchen uses a computerized telephone to take and receive electronic messages and make reservations for the ball game. A nomadic businessman in an airport shuttle bus tells his PDA how much he's willing to spend on a used car for his son, what makes he prefers and the maximum acceptable mileage. He sends his PDA on a shopping trip around the region with a single touch.
It all sounds thrilling--empowering for consumers and businesses alike. But in the 21st-century world of interactive television, broadband Internet access and ubiquitous multipurpose communications gizmos, every message you send and each dollar you spend could be an unbidden messenger as well. Electronic traces of your passage will remain in data banks of cable, telephone and on-line service providers. And the government wants to install a trap door in software and hardware used to encrypt messages and data from medical smart cards, IRS records, digital cash transfers and plain old e-mail.
These databases will be digital gold in the world of direct marketing, where vendors and advertisers will tailor special offers to individuals based upon this information and deliver coupons that will issue from your smart cable TV set-top box. What's to prevent unscrupulous third parties—or underpaid government workers with access to the software trap door--from obtaining information that could be used to harm consumers? Not much, judging from stories like that of black-data buccaneer Al Schweitzer, who bought and sold confidential government files for a living (see "Penetrating Uncle Sam's Data," page 68). Unless government agencies, infrastructure suppliers, software wizards and producers of programming can guarantee privacy in the rapidly expanding web of cyberspace, it may be impossible for the trust upon which a virtual community depends to develop sufficiently to make the grand digital experiment a success. Without this assurance there will be no secure business communications, and the kind of transactional data that is currently gathered by insurance firms, credit companies and banks might fall into the hands of anyone with the skills to track it across the global network. Security of transactions over cable networks is already a concern to American consumers, according to surveys by Viacom Cable and others. And the lack of secure transaction methods may already be hampering buying and selling via modem. Consumer's unwillingness to put it on their Visa when traveling in cyberspace has slowed public acceptance of such services as American Airlines' Easy Sabre ticket service, available on Prodigy, America Online and other on-line services. Consumers, like businesses, are eager to take advantage of the digital highway, but they are leery of financial data and other sensitive information falling into the wrong hands.
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