************** http://pathfinder.com/netly/editorial/0,1012,1050,00.html The Netly News June 12, 1997 Privacy? What Privacy? by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) I have a confession to make: Unlike many of my civil libertarian colleagues, I believe you have no general right to privacy online. Sure, you have the right to protect your personal data, but you shouldn't be able to stop someone else from passing along that information if you let it leave your computer. That's your responsibility. So you can imagine my dismay when I learned I'd be sitting through four full days of Federal Trade Commission hearings this week on Internet privacy. The commission's goal? To define "privacy rights" for the Net -- and to be perhaps the first federal agency to regulate it. The commissioners are being spurred on by consumer groups that want the government to bar firms from collecting information about your online wanderings. Businesses say that such a rule would stifle Internet advertising and commerce and have recently released a flurry of self-regulatory proposals. [...] Which is one reason why I think there is no general right to privacy -- at least as the consumer groups and privacy advocates describe it. Rotenberg likes to say "Privacy is not an absolute right, but a fundamental right." But in truth, privacy is not a right but a preference: Some people want more of it than others. Of course there's an essential right to privacy from the government. (Beware government databases: Nazis used census data in Germany and Holland to track down and eliminate undesirables.) You also have a right to privacy from Peeping Toms. But -- no matter how much big-government fetishists want this to be true -- you don't own information about yourself. After all, journalists are able to investigate someone's private life and publish an article -- even if it contains embarrassing personal details. This is a good thing: Any restrictions would weaken the First Amendment. Then there's gossip, which is a time-honored way of trading in others' personal information. "The reindeer-herding Lapps, for whom theft of livestock is easy and common, gossip about who has stolen which animal and where they are," sociologist Sally Engle Merry writes. [...] ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/