Mike Markley wrote:
What about being denied a job because you have been treated for some disease? How about being denied a loan because your medical history has a profile that indicates that your life expectancy is shorter than the duration of the loan? It seems that the potential for abuse is so great that we should not allow such cross referencing. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
There's the rub! While I may not _like_ what people or companies do with data about me, I generally don't support laws telling them what they can do, what they can't do, etc. And such normative laws ("they shouldn't keep such records and hence we'll outlaw them") won't work in an era of strong crypto and privacy. In fact, some of us support data havens precisely to have records of, say, terminal diseases so we'll not lend money to Joe-who-has-AIDS. It may not be "fair" to Joe, but it's my money. (Same idea as in using offshore or cryptospatial data havens to bypass the nonsense in the "Fair Credit Reporting Act" that outlaws the keeping of certain kinds of facts about credit applicants, such as that they declared bankruptcy 10 years ago or that they left a string of bad debts in Germany in the 1970s, etc.) I won't go into the many issues here, as this is an ideological digression. Cypherpunks understand that laws won't protect their privacy. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."