Expert: Protect yourself
Privacy floats free in cyberspace

September 11, 1995
Section: Business
Page: F-14

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Maureen Harrington, Denver Post Staff Writer

Professor Gary Marx is a voice of reason preaching caution and vigilance on the road to the future.

A sociologist, Marx offers rational commentary in the midst of a silly season that saw the Windows 95 marketing lollapalooza, Time magazine's Orwellian hissy fit on cyberporn, and the increasing angst of middle Americans as techno-mania encroaches on our lives. An internationally recognized expert on surveillance and privacy in cyberspace, Marx is chairman of the sociology department at the University of Colorado and one of the founders of a communications initiative at CU designed in part to look at the problems of technology.

Marx is the scout sent ahead to discover what lies beyond our borders.

He has developed ideas about what individuals and groups might do to protect themselves from the dangers of eroding privacy. Or, as he would say, "speculate" about it - because hard data about a world that is transmuting itself nano-second by nano-second isn't available.

Marx, who published the seminal book on surveillance, Undercover, in 1988, applied his academic research in police "watching" to the ever-increasing "information-gathering powers of the state and private organizations."

Having studied privacy and its violators for more than a decade, Marx, a Ph.D. from Berkeley, acknowledges the powers of technology but is wary of its applications.

"I come neither to torch technology nor to become a torch singer for its wonders," says Marx.

"One need not rigidly accept Frankensteinian visions, nor become a machine-breaking Luddite to appreciate the importance of approaching the future with the caution of a flashing yellow, rather than a green light," he says.

The possibility that privacy may be less protected as technology advances, its value eroding without our taking much notice, is a dominant theme of Marx's work.

Marx isn't the only one pointing to the growing powers of data-gathering firms that use increasingly sophisticated and intrusive methods of collecting information. The telemarketing industry is growing about 30 percent every year, Marx said. The breadth of the information it gathers is astounding - Social Security numbers, bank information, consumer habits, marital status, phone numbers and addresses.

The same technology that enables workers to free themselves of the office - to work at home while raising children, for instance - could change conventional telephone tapping.

"With a modem, a knowledgeable individual could remotely reprogram a line so that all calls are simultaneously (and silently) rerouted to a third line and recorded," Marx said.

Reporters and felons no longer have to leave the office to obtain personal information. Public information can be easily accessed through computer data bases.

"Work monitoring has been taken to new heights or depths, depending on your point of view," Marx said. "Quantity of keystroke activity, number of errors and corrections, speed of work and time away from the computer can be measured."

And the capabilities of a police state grow each day.

An FBI advisory board recently recommended putting the names of those suspected, but not arrested, of crimes into a nationally accessible computer data base. Friends and associates of known criminals could be in that computer as well. So far, the FBI has rejected the proposal, but Marx said that the pressure to create such national data bases is strong and growing.

Dependence on technology - the assumption that we are safe - also can have disastrous, unintended effects, Marx said.

In Los Angeles, a woman depending on police technology was killed by her estranged husband.

The man shot and killed the woman, who had not reported his threats to police. She assumed that she was safe because he was wearing a monitoring bracelet.

Marx suggests that one reason for the increase in carjackings is that it has become so hard for thieves to break into and hot-wire cars with security systems.

"Making it harder to break into cars causes a change in tactics," he said. "A frustrated thief may firebomb a car on the street when he can't get in to get the radio. The radio is not taken, but the car is destroyed."

A social scientist who advises policymakers, Marx does have some suggestions for individuals to protect themselves from intrusion. He suggests that people be wary of giving out even the most innocuous information - telephone numbers, address, ages, Social Security numbers - unless the rationale is clear.

"Understand that every bit of that stuff goes into data bases, and you may not be happy to find your privacy has been invaded, that a marketing research company has all this stuff," Marx said.

It has been more than a decade since there was a national commission to considerprivacy issues. Marx suggests that another be established. Items on the agenda should include computer networks and the gathering and selling of data without individual knowledge or consent.

As a sociologist, Marx looks at the cultural climate, and he has pointed to a number of "techno-fallacies" that may fuel future technological travesty:

• The fallacy of assuming that only the guilty have to fear the development of intrusive technology. "It's not true that if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. The reason that we have envelopes around letters, is not because it is illegal or immoral. Our sense of self and friendship are determined by control of personal information. The sharing of information is intimate."

• The legalistic fallacy of assuming that the only criterion that ought to guide the use of technology is whether the law permits it. "We must begin with the law as a guide, but not stop with it. Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean that you should (do it). Selling of mass marketing information has been justified by the First Amendment. Your bank records have very modest federal protection. Your bank can legally show your records to law enforcement, but many won't do it."

• The fallacy of assuming that pragmatism and efficiency should automatically overrule other values such as fairness or equity. "If you just have efficiency, you might have a society that was unkind, without compassion or fairness."

• The fallacy of assuming that personal information on customers or clients possessed by a company can be bought and sold with impunity. "Information can hurt individuals. Subscribers to certain magazines could be marked by either those who want to sell something to them or would use their interests to hurt them."

• The fallacy of perfect containment - that technology always will remain the solution rather than become the problem. "Today's solutions can become tomorrow's problems,"Marx says. "It's interesting that we thought that the car would be an anti-pollution device. The cure-all for the horse manure all over the cities that was causing health problems."