Shell Shocked: Sign this form, please, and we’ll let you have your privacy
Another familiar form letter arrived the other day. It said “Customer privacy notice.” Not another privacy, notice I thought to myself. I’ve gotten so many privacy notices from banks, cable companies, credit card companies, physicians, even the bartender at Doc Ford’s, that my privacy has indeed been invaded by privacy notices.
I pity the poor mail delivery person who has to continually lug all these privacy form letters around reminding each of us that we have a right to privacy even though we’re being bombarded by these forms.
Every time you visit your doctor you’re required to sign a form that says you have read their four-hundred page booklet on your right to privacy but understand that confidential medical information may be submitted to National Enquirer if the attending physician feels that there’s a book in it for him.
Of course, you sign the form because your unusual medical ailment — vocal cords that create involuntary arias — might make both you and the doctor rich, particularly if the movie rights are sold to Warner Brothers.
The deeper philosophical question to come out of this frantic trend to individual isolation is just what is privacy, why is it important, and what does it mean?
There are people who don’t want anyone to know anything about them. They will sign every privacy form that comes their way and crave more. In fact, they will insist that their dry cleaners sign such forms because they don’t want the world to know how often they dry clean their Sunday finest.
Or they insist that their fitness trainers sign privacy forms so as never to reveal how many sets of biceps curls they’re capable of doing. Or car wash proprietors who could reveal compromising information about moldy tacos found in the back seat.
All such information can be used to blackmail, extort and publicly embarrass or humiliate. After all, personal matters are just that, personal, and privacy notices are intended to keep personal matters personal.
But vendors don’t regard personal matters as being personal. They want to know everything about you so that they can share this information with other vendors. Nowadays, information can be shared via the internet and, before you know it, you’re getting marriage proposals from Thailand. Or offers to split ten million dollars that someone in Russia just happens to have handy and wants to deposit in your bank account.
I just received two privacy notices today, one from Chase and the other from Comcast. Chase explains its privacy policy this way: “This policy explains what Chase does to keep information about you private and secure. We want you to know how we manage that information to serve you and that you have choices about how it is shared.”
Chase goes on to tell me what my options for the sharing of information are: who can get this information and under what circumstances. I have a choice to shut it down completely or allow private information about me to be distributed if Chase were to add a gift of $100,000 to my checking account. I wish.
Comcast tells me that the Cable Act imposes limitations on cable operators in the collection and disclosure of personally identifiable information. What this means is that Comcast can’t disclose my TV preference for “Dancing with the Stars” at the risk of my switching to Direct TV and fomenting public unrest. The bottom line is that we can all tell these vendors that no information about ourselves will be permitted to be shared with others. We can try this option, of course, but somehow the vendors find loopholes.
Oh, we didn’t think you meant it. Weren’t you kidding around? We thought you’d love to have others know how much money you make, what you eat for dinner, how you handle your inner demons or how you play the green on the third hole at the Dunes.
Privacy. The only true privacy I know is when my wife tells me to leave her alone.