PrivacyintheInformationAge信息时代的个人隐私.docVIP

Privacy in the Information Age Imagine a small plastic card that holds all manner of information about you on a tiny memory chip (芯片): your date of birth, Social Security Number, credit and medical histories. And suppose the same card lets you drive a car, get medicine, get cash from machines, pay parking tickets, and collect government benefits. One version of this so-called smart card is already in use. Some insurance companies issue medical history cards of customers, who need them to get medicine. This type of technology evolves out of convenience, says Evan Hendricks (伊万·亨德里克斯), editor of the Privacy Times (《私密时代》) newspaper, but the dark side is that landlords, employers, and insurance companies could say we wont do business with you unless you show us your card. Personal information gets harder to protect as more companies and government agencies build computerized databases (数据库) that are easily linked. You can go from one database to another the way people go from one bar to another, says Hendricks. The information superhighway will probably be developed by corporations, but the government is always willing to associate itself with these things. Companies develop databases to better target customers and then the government uses these databases for investigating crimes. According to writer Simson L. Garfinkel (辛姆森·L. 加芬克尔), the database trend started with Ronald Reagans stories of people on welfare cheating the government. It was called Operation Match (匹配行动), says a privacy expert, and it matched databases of people who owed money to the government with other databases of people who received money from the government. Operation Match went after government employees who had not paid back student loans the government had given them for college, and welfare clients with large unreported incomes. Saving the public from cheats and criminals has been an effective excuse for cutting back everyones personal privacy. The government has been p