On Fri, Dec 08, 2000 at 01:00:25AM -0500, Daniel Orr wrote:
Ronald Plesser, quoted at the end of the article, is an attorney for the Individual Reference Services group. You may remember the group as among the most vocal defenders of Lexis-Nexis when LN was going to sell social security numbers via it PTRAK service. Lexis is one of their members.
Ron is far more than that: He's also out of house counsel for DMA.
Westin, the academic who ran the survey, is less than loved among many privacy advocates. I don't know the guy. He's probably on this listserv somewhere.
I do; I was even at his 70th (I think) birthday party. I think the odds that he's on this list are phenomenally low. Privacy leftists (what you really mean when you're saying privacy advocates) don't like him because they think that after some seminal work he did, he sold out and now supports the idea that there are some valid reasons for corporate data exchange, etc. Heresy!
Also, note the total absence of response from any actual privacy group such as EPIC or Junkbusters, something a balanced piece wouldn't omit.
You mean "privacy leftists," don't you? -Declan