`You don’t have to be paranoid to be concerned about privacy.” Angry consumers are raising complaints about identity theft, the proliferation of junk mail, telemarketing calls and e-mail spamming. Congress has responded to this privacy peril with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which requires banks, credit-card companies and financial institutions to notify customers by July 1 about how their personal data is used.
Retail financial institutions have scrambled to issue their slick brochures called “Important privacy notices” by the July deadline. The letters, flyers and booklets from these companies explaining their elaborate privacy policies are ample evidence that the paranoia surrounding personal privacy issues is totally justified.
Here is an example of a form letter I received from a company attempting to reassure its customers about the confidentiality and privacy of their personal information:
Important privacy notice
Dear valued customer
We are writing to share with you the details of our privacy policy. As a valued member of our family of customers, you are entitled to the absolute privacy of the personal information you have shared with us. One of our highest priorities is information security. We regularly review our security standards and practices to protect against unauthorized access to information.
We work hard to collect detailed information about you that helps us provide you with better services, better products and ensures opportunities to broaden our working relationship. The types of information we collect are:
– Information we receive from you on applications, forms, through our Web sites and from what we extract from you in coercive interviews about the intimacies of your personal life;
– Information we receive from third parties with or without your permission, including your priest, personal physician, psychiatrist, video rental and liquor stores and the local casino;
– Information we receive from consumer reporting agencies, our own private detectives and others who regularly snoop into the sordid details of your private life;
– In short, we maintain the broadest dossier on your life, which includes more comprehensive and embarrassing information about you than even the late, great FBI director J. Edgar Hoover might have had.
– All this information is designed to allow us to provide you with better service and to sell you more useless products. We want to assure you that none of this information has been collected to satisfy the prurient interests of our voyeuristic marketing department.
– Information security is one of our highest priorities. We safeguard information by regularly assessing security standards and procedures to protect against unauthorized access to personal information. We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to guard your personal information. In fact, our computer software systems were crafted by the same programmers who designed the sophisticated systems at the Pentagon. Sure, teenage hackers gained access to top-secret Defense Department information, but we have been assured that incident was a total fluke that couldn’t happen here.
– Of course we know your Social Security number, your mother’s maiden name, your great grandmother’s middle name, and your brother’s nickname. However, the only employees in our company with access to this confidential information (as well as your total assets, gross annual income, medical records and complete video rental records) are those with an absolute need to know and those who are dying of curiosity.
– Moreover, we promise not to reveal any of your information to anyone other than our associated companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, other interested parties and telemarketers who operate only between 6 and 8 p.m., unless you advise us not to do so within 48 hours. If you choose to opt out of our proposed information-sharing program, simply call us at 1-800-PRIVATE. For total privacy, press #1; for privacy of all information except as we in our discretion decide to release, press #2; for no privacy at all, press #3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. If you would like to speak with our corporate vice president of privacy, I.M. Nosey II, please press #0.
– If you prefer that we not share your personal information with companies, associations and organizations outside our own family of companies, you may “opt out” by calling our 800 number and signing a 10-page affidavit in triplicate confirming your request to hide all that embarrassing information about your private life. Of course, you should be aware that, if you exercise this option, we will all know for certain that there is a lot of embarrassing stuff in your personal computer file for us to download and e-mail to all our fellow employees and friends.
Data privacy has become the mantra of the American financial industry. All those “Important privacy notices” are intended to assure customers that the secrets of their personal lives and fortunes are safe and secure. Somehow, I’m not convinced. Methinks thou dost reassure too much.
