Dave Halstead, Helen Ashman, Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG8 1BB, U.K., hla@cs.nott.ac.uk
Privacy, marketing,
In this paper, we review the various practices relating to the collection, dissemination and use of personal data. Information about people is becoming increasingly useful to marketing agents, and vast digital collections of personal information are being collected. In some cases, the data is sold, but in others, it is freely available. Now that the Web has become the ultimate data dissemination tool, databases of personal information can be queried very quickly, easily, and above all, anonymously. Never has the task of an investigator (or a casual interrogator) been easier.
It also is clear that data collection is increasingly a core activity of private companies, rather than government organisations. Orwell overshadowed a generation of readers with the "Big Brother" of 1984, and the spectre of governmental databases often provokes a Big Brother scare. However the public is less inclined to view commercial data collections as a threat to personal privacy or liberties. This could in part be because such data collections are hidden, and their extent and use are not publicised. So while Identity card proposals, such as the Australia Card of the early 1980s, are almost universally condemned, more insidious electronic profiling such as supermarket loyalty cards meet with indifference, despite the fact that even more detailed data is available.
We set out to discover how much information could be available on a single person through publicly accessible data sources. The aim is to highlight the boundaries of what information can be collected and to consider how this fits in with the current legal position in the UK. The can also include information on a specific company, rather than a person. This is interesting because a company has the same legal rights as an individual under British law.
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