Your numbers, please

Cyberspace appears to be the last frontier of freedom and liberty.
Last year there were suggestions that taxes be levied on Internet
commerce. It didn’t take the global population of the Internet very long
to mobilize and inform government officials at every level of government
of the depth of their displeasure.

While elected government officials appear to have received the “no
new Internet taxes” message loud and clear, it is becoming apparent that
appointed officials and commercial entities do not understand the “don’t
tread on me” characteristics of the Internet. Witness the more than
135,000 comments sent to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC), one of the four federal agencies pushing the “Know Your
Customer” regulation. I would wager that 95 percent of those comments
came from Internet users. Just last week the House Committee on Banking
and Financial Services approved an amendment to block the “Know Your
Customer” regulations.

However, in the last few months a new front on the fight to preserve
privacy has opened. Several large corporations are now trying to
infringe upon personal liberty, a freedom that is inherent on the
Internet. The latest of these attempts has been by two U.S.
mega-corporations who ought to remember that it was American freedoms
that gave them the opportunity to grow and prosper. While many of us
feared that they had long ago outgrown their entrepreneurial roots and
had fallen into the bureaucracy of corporate America, it is still sad to
watch Intel and Microsoft lose their free, entrepreneurial spirit.

Yet in the search for security, privacy is threatened by the computer
revolution. On Sept. 28, 1998, an interesting article appeared in the
New York Times about Veridicom, a tiny start-up company in Santa Clara, Calif. Verdicom
is the manufacturer of a postage stamp size computer chip, which reads a
fingerprint, and its biggest investors are two well-known computer
products manufacturers: Intel and Lucent Technologies. The latter is the
company spun off from AT&T’s Bell Laboratories which owns the patents to
this chip.

The chip named OpenTouch is accurate enough to meet the FBI’s
standards for personal identification. While the first uses for this
chip are to be in notebook computers marketed this year, every major
computer hardware manufacturer is currently testing possible
applications. Thus its potential use is only limited by the imagination
of security conscious businesses: computers to door locks, driver’s
licenses to cell phones, and even to bankcards. This chip is only one
part of computer security-related technology, which is becoming the
ultimate privacy double-edged sword. As the New York Times author, Bob
Fixmer, puts it, “Perhaps the most ambiguous line between privacy
threats and security will be the use of Veridicom’s technology on the
Internet. In many ways, it will be the ultimate “cookie.”

Yet, the fight against corporate America to maintain privacy rights
has already heated up as the Electronic Privacy Information Center
(EPIC), Junkbusters Corp,
Privacy International,
the Center for Media Education, and the
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse are all writing the FTC and computer
manufacturers to insist that the Pentium III should be recalled as it
would threaten the privacy of computer users, enabling marketers,
governments and others to track computer users’ visits to the internet.
In addition several of the groups have called for a boycott of Intel
Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of computer chips.

Originally Intel installed the ID system on its chip but allowed the
user to disable it. As a result of privacy concerns Intel will
automatically disable the ID system and give users a software utility if
they wished to turn it on. But the privacy advocates are not satisfied
and want the Pentium III ID system permanently disabled by Intel. They
argue that computer manufacturers will make the final decision on
enabling the ID system, not Intel. Junkbuster’s Jason Catlett called the
process,
“ineffective and out of [Intel’s] hands.”

At the same time that privacy groups are fighting Intel, along comes
a new more invasive privacy threat from none other than Microsoft. Last
Sunday’s New York Times broke the story of how Microsoft admitted that
the registration procedure in Windows 98 and other products had the
capability of registering computers, their owners and their documents.
The difference between the ID number on the Pentium III chip and the
Microsoft registration number is that the software number is linked to
individual names, the identifying numbers on the user’s computer and
even to documents created on those machines.

In a manner similar to Intel’s blaming the chip ID number on the
wishes of their customers, Microsoft first explained the invasive
collection of data as a tool “to help users diagnose problems with their
computers more accurately.” However, when Robert M. Smith, president of
Phar Lap Software, Inc. who discovered the privacy invasion through the
Internet, confronted Microsoft their explanation was that the numbers
were being generated to ensure that components would not clash with
other components in a network environment. But later on March 3, Mr.
Smith found that when users register Windows 98, a specific number, the
Globally Unique Identifier, was being sent to Microsoft along with the
user’s name, address, demographic data and information about the
computer and what software was being used. Microsoft is now saying that
they will disable the automatic registration in their next release of
Windows 98.

From big government to big business the threat to individual freedom
and privacy is real and growing. The Clinton administration, in a policy
issued in July 1997, has essentially left the Internet privacy issue of
data collection and usage in the hands of the industry. A Federal
Trade Commission study last summer demonstrated the lack of privacy for
online users.
But that
study has received very little attention. We can only hope that the back
to back privacy intrusion by two of the biggest computer giants may lead
everyone to question the intrusive capabilities of not only the Internet
but of technology itself. Both governments and corporations have a
passion and an appetite for data collection. Whether names or numbers,
the outcome is the same. We all lose our privacy and with it our
Freedom.

Tanya K. Metaksa

Tanya K. Metaksa is the former executive director of the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action. She is the author of "Safe, Not Sorry," a self-protection manual, published in 1997. She has appeared on numerous talk and interview shows such as "Crossfire," the "Today" show, "Nightline," "This Week with David Brinkley" and the "McNeil-Lehrer Hour," among others. Read more of Tanya K. Metaksa's articles here.