Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!pyramid!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor From: hunter-larry@YALE.ARPA (Larry Hunter) Newsgroups: comp.society Subject: Ownership of information about yourself Message-ID: <1637@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> Date: 1 Mar 88 00:18:06 GMT Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM Lines: 75 Approved: taylor@hplabs In discussing Private Agreements to Restrict Information, Guthery at asc.sdr.slb.com writes: All information about Mr. Hanly's person is his property and he can do with it as he pleases.... I'm not a lawyer, but I write a lot on privacy and technology issues. Although this position seems to be clearly desirable to me, it is NOT the law. Information has occasionally been treated as intangible property, but you have no property interests whatsoever in information about yourself. If someone who has information about you decides to sell it or give it away, you have absolutely nothing to say about it. The only exceptions to this are explicit prohibitions in contracts you enter into and the few laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act or libel law that proscribe activity around particular uses of information. If the phone company wants to sell your long distance records to someone, they can. If your employer wants to disclose your income, he can. If your bank or creditors wants to sell your account information they can. Recordkeepers may even be forced to keep information about you that they do not want to, and then forced to turn it over to the government on demand. There is no legislative or constitutional prohibition on disclosing or selling information about individuals. This was annunciated quite clearly in the US Supreme court's single most important case of the information age, California Banker's Association v. Schultz (416 US 21, 39 L Ed 2nd 812, 94 S Ct 1494, decided April 1974). I think it is worth describing this case in some detail because it is not well known and its implications are so important: The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970... authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to prescribe by regulation certain bank recordkeeping and reporting requirements.... The Act is designed to obtain financial information having a 'high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory investigations or proceedings.' Title I of the Act requires financial institutions to maintain records of their customers' identities, to make microfilm copies of checks and similar instruments, and to keep records of certain other items. Title II of the act requires the reporting to the Federal Government of certain foreign and domestic financial transactions.... Suits were brought by various plantiffs challenging the constitutionality of the Act, principly on the ground that it violated the Fourth Amendment, because when the bank makes and keeps records under compulsion of the Secretary's regulations it acts as a Government agent and thereby engages in the seizure of its customers' records.... [The ACLU, a plantiff, also attacked] on Fifth Amendment grounds, as violating the priviledge against self-incrimination.... [The Supreme Court, in a decision authored by Rehnquist, held:] There is a sufficient nexus between the evil Congress sought to address and the recordkeeping procedure to meet the requirements of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment... The regulations for the reporting by financial institutions of domestic financial transactions are reasonable and abridge no Fourth Amendment rights of such institutions, which are themselves parties to the transactions involved, since neither `incorporated nor unincorporated associations [have] an unqualified right to conduct their affairs in secret.'... The depositor plantiffs... lack standing to challenge the domestic reporting regulations. It is therefore unnecessary to consider contentions made by the bank and depositor plantiffs that the regulations are constitutionally defective because they do not require the financial institution to notify the customer that a report will be filed.... The bank plantiffs cannot vicariously assert Fifth Amendment claims on behalf of their depositors under the circumstances present here, since the depositors cannot assert those claims themselves.... [Quoting a previous tax case:] 'It is difficult to see how the summoning of a third party or the records of a third party can violate the rights of the taxpayer, even if criminal prosecution is contemplated or in progress.' One very important thing to note here is that the depositors (the people about whom the information is kept) DO NOT EVEN HAVE STANDING. That means they cannot bring action in a court of law about this issue. The disposition of third party records about you is none of your business. You have NO property right in information that others have about you. Sorry. Larry Hunter