Saturday, June 10, 2006

My Virtual "Daughter"

For the past twenty years, approximately, my husband and I have been receiving mail for “Katie McGuire”: first it was a congratulations on her birth, despite a compelling lack of evidence of any natal (alright, I was hefty, but not that fat!). Then it moved to suggestions for infant formula, diapers and car seats. Then basic books and toys for toddlers, then ads for pre-school placement, etc.

We tried at first to send these back with explanations that we were childless by choice, and the fact that we had married a year before this junk mail started pouring in did not by itself guarantee a baby in the works. After about five years, we gave up, and I’ve been watching with queasy fascination as “Katie” grew up in the eyes of the merchandisers: ads for “American Girl” dolls, and summer camp slowly morphed into important-looking envelopes for “The Parents of Katie McGuire” that asked, “Have you considered how to pay for college?” (Being aware of the tuition increases, since I was taking a Masters degree, I was really glad we didn’t have to consider that!) Even after we moved, those advertisers found us -- though I guarantee you I did not send them moving notices!

And then the offers from the colleges themselves poured in, and offers to tutor young Katie for those dread SATs. I guess “Katie” must have made her choice, because recently the declining volume of her junk mail tends to ask her if she’s made up her mind on career choice or needs special training to get that certificate to enable her to get a good job in the current market. In some ways I dread the day when the Über-List decides that she has finally moved away, and we no longer get to watch her phantom growth from infant to young industrious womanhood. And what if they shunt me to another list? Do I want to know I’m a “grandma“?

Joking aside, I wonder about this amorphous meta-list that somehow tracks the development and habits of a large part of our population. Obviously not flaw-proof, demographics has become increasingly insistent that it knows what we are about… and with some validity. The recent Google and Yahoo decisions viz. releasing information on online searches reminds us that this information is being collected daily. The amount of information actually collected would be frightening if we had any way to track it [Testing... testing.... is this sentence being monitored?].

Yet for some reason, the privacy of the data collection agencies is much, much more protected than that of our individual families, so we can never find out how much that is.And there seems to be no compulsion about using the info to target us for “an offer we can’t refuse”. I have started to get those AARP offers -- oh, for the good old days when I could lie about my age! Has technology outpaced our awareness of and decisions about how much we want strangers to know? Have we all just passively accepted that this data collection will continue because corporations “have the right” to assemble dossiers on us? Is there no balance that can be struck between privacy and acquiring facts?

It’s all well and good to say, Just Use Cash, Just Avoid the Internet… but don’t we have the right to participate in our society without giving up privacy? The new HIPPA laws, touted to increase the privacy of the individual, in effect does the opposite. Having worked in a hospital, I can tell you that the comprehensive consent form that you sign in order to have any medical procedure done effectively allows the hospital to spread your information farther without a specific consent form that it has ever been able to do. And how many of us are willing to give up going to the doctor? I have read through some of those forms and there are cleverly-worded phrases that give them the right to give your information to their development office for fundraising, their advertising unit for more junk mail and to “third parties with which we work”… all without your knowing that it happened. And then suddenly we’re getting mail for medical assistance devices!

I fear that the industries with a vested interest in grabbing all the information they can get have inundated the average person with “obstacles to saying no” until he or she has just given up, noting that they are giving up privacy when they sign for a shopping card, doctor’s visit or online computer game, but not knowing what to do about it. And it will be continued until we put the effort into stopping it. Don’t let the corporate data-mining honchos re-frame (what an innocuous-sounding word!) the discussion such that those who seek to maintain some control over their personal information are “people with something to hide” or “fringe fanatics”. I am a very middle-class, middle-age, middle-everything person, and it’s starting to scare me. This issue concerns all of us. By the time you discover that too much information about you is out in the public, it will be entirely too late.

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