Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!pyramid!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor
From: andy@rocky.stanford.edu (Andy Freeman)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: The Control of Information
Message-ID: <1314@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 7 Jan 88 07:01:10 GMT
Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
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Approved: taylor@hplabs

(This has come up on comp.risks, risks digests to arpa fans, and this 
 is the reply I sent to that group)

The recent controversy over access to financial records of companies
(the companies want to control it and some find this offensive) is
somewhat similar to the continuing furor over records about people,
except that popular opinion in the latter case is that the people
should be able to control information about themselves.

Is there an essential difference here and what is it?  Is the corner
gas station entitled to more privacy than IBM?  Why?  Are all the
corner gas stations entitled to more privacy than IBM?  (The former
group is comparable in size to IBM.)

Note that in the current case, companies collected the information
about themselves while in most privacy invasion cases, the person
doesn't collect the information.  If one is going to argue on property
rights alone, these companies are entitled to control access (to the
information they collected) while people in the other case aren't.

Andy Freeman