Editorial: Ignoring the real outrage

Monday, April 10, 2000 | 9:15 a.m.

Despite the attention this flap has generated, the real story that has gone ignored is how our privacy rights are getting chipped away every day by businesses, especially by large financial institutions. For those who get queasy because the Census Bureau asks whether your home has toilets that flush or how long it takes you to drive to work, consider this: Last year Charter Pacific Bank in California sold 3.7 million credit card numbers to Kenneth Taves -- a convicted felon. Taves has been accused of billing about 900,000 of these accounts, for a total of $45 million, to access X-rated websites.

Then there's the case of Chase Manhattan Bank, which violated its own privacy policy by providing marketers with personal data about its credit card holders. Why would the financial conglomerate do this? For money. Chase Manhattan Bank was getting a 24 percent commission on eventual sales made by these marketing firms. It wasn't until New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer found out about this practice that Chase Manhattan Bank agreed in January to revise its policies, halting the flow of credit and spending information (it still, however, sells to outside firms other data, such as customers' names, addresses and telephone numbers).

Despite these abuses, don't expect any help from Congress (including from all those Republicans who have been trashing the census long forms). After all, it was Congress that overwhelmingly voted to weaken privacy protections last year when it passed legislation that overhauled the financial services industry (Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., was one of the few legislators who voted against the legislation).

This new law allows insurance companies, banks and investment firms to merge. Unfortunately Congress also granted these newly affiliated companies the power to share with each other a customer's personal information, including medical records and Social Security numbers. What's more, these companies don't even have to get the customer's consent before they share this information. So when politicians start ranting about the intrusive census questions, just remember that the real danger resides with the private companies swapping all of your personal records, a situation that Congress has allowed to proliferate.