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Be on the wave or under it™
The News – 09/10/01
In
this Issue:
The
Right to Privacy?
Recently,
in a discussion group I participate in, someone asked, “What happened to our
right to privacy?” He was appalled at a recent judicial decision that, he
claimed, stated “that phone calls you place and take in your own home cannot be
considered private.”
While
I certainly agree with the sentiment, I must point out that there’s nothing in
the Constitution that guarantees privacy. The 4th Amendment guarantees
citizens’ security of “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures,” but doesn’t guarantee privacy. In fact, the word
doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution or the amendments.
There
are some laws on the books regarding privacy, however, but most only concern
the federal government. In 1998 the White House issued a memorandum on Privacy
and Personal Information in Federal Records, saying: “Privacy is a cherished
American value, closely linked to our concepts of personal freedom and
well-being. At the same time, fundamental principles such as those underlying
the First Amendment, perhaps the most important hallmark of American democracy,
protect the free flow of information in our society.” The memorandum directs
Federal agency heads to “assure that their use of new information technologies
sustain, and do not erode, the protections provided in all statutes relating to
agency use, collection, and disclosure of personal information,” and that they
follow the Privacy Act of 1974. One wonders why it was necessary to direct
government agencies to obey the law!
There
is one bill, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act, enacted in late 1999 with a compliance date of July of this year, that
does regulate what financial institutions can do with non-public information
about you. It’s because of this law that you’ve been receiving the privacy
policies of the various financial institutions in your life. These institutions
must, “Provide an opt-out notice, with the initial notice or separately, prior
to a financial institution sharing nonpublic personal information with
nonaffiliated third parties.” So now’s your chance to opt out.
Also
this year, the privacy provisions of the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 became effective,
with a compliance date of April 14, 2003. The original 1996 law gave Congress
until August 21, 1999, to pass comprehensive health privacy legislation. When
Congress did not enact such legislation after three years, the law required the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to craft such protections by
regulation. The regulations basically protect your health information from
being disclosed without your consent. However, since medical establishments
share information all the time in the process of caring for you, this gets a
bit sticky. The rules are expected to cost $17.6 billion over 10 years to
implement, while generating significant offsetting savings.
Despite
some recent advances, and despite the cherished nature of privacy, there are
few rules is binding on non-financial or non-health institutions. Private
citizens really have no right to privacy in other arenas. Sure there’s a lot of
talk about privacy, and about the EU privacy rules, but, as you can see from Congress’
HIPAA foot dragging, our government really has little interest in proactively enacting
laws to protect our privacy from non-governmental entities. The FTC has created
the elements of fair information practices (notice, choice, access, security,
and contact), but there’s no enforcement mechanism. There’s a lot of interest
in trading in online information (failed dot-coms trying to sell client lists),
but these challenges tend to stand on the concept of the contractual nature of
a site’s voluntary privacy policy.
Sun
CEO Scott McNealy said a couple of years ago, “You have no privacy. Get over
it.” Is this our fate? Must we stand by while private companies amass
tremendous databases of information (don’t get me started on Microsoft’s
Passport!) on us? Or should we make our elected representatives aware that we’d
just as soon keep our private matters private? Will it take being turned down
for a job because you have a genetic predisposition to cancer to bring the
point home? And while we’re at it, as marketers, what is our responsibility to
refrain from infringing on privacy? We need answers to these questions soon,
IMHO. I’m interested in your thoughts on these matters. Send them in and I’ll
publish them in a future SNS.
Privacy
Backgrounder
Briefly
Noted
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Shameless
Self-Promotion Dept.: I’ve added some functionality to the Marketing section of
the StratVantage Web site. Among other things, you can now track airline
flights. I’m planning on making this page a dumping ground, er,
demonstration area for the best (and some of the worst) of the online marketing
techniques around. After all, any traffic to your Web site is good
traffic, right? Wrong, spam-breath! If you have a hosting company that
throttles your Web site if you have too many visitors (like I do), you don’t
need lots of lookie-Lou’s. And speaking of Web site throttling, my hosting
company has finally admitted that they’ve been turning away users of the
StratVantage Web site erroneously, due to a bug in their traffic monitoring
software. Consequently, they’re moving the site to their new UNIX servers,
and that will solve the problem (yeah it will!). So if you can’t get to my
site over the weekend or early next week, that’s what’s happening.
StratVantage
Marketing
- Web Site Liability:
Alert SNS Reader Andrew Hargreave sends along this item: According to
Margaret Jane Radin, director of Stanford's Program on Law, Science and
Technology, the owners of a hacked Web site could be liable for whatever
problems arise from the malfunction or downtime of the site. Radin
concludes that “there is a 'significant risk' that in the near future
targeted Web sites will be held liable to their customers for harm arising
from distributed denial-of-service attacks.” Since most Web hosters have
some sort of Service Level Agreement (SLA), make sure they don’t wiggle
out of their share of responsibility for downtime.
NWFusion
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Get
‘Em While They’re Young: The state of Arizona is planning on delivering more than
7,000 software titles to 850,000 students in all 1,200 of its schools
statewide using an Application Service Provider (ASP) approach. Access to
the applications will cost $8.16 per student per year. The ASP deal
involves an unprecedented agreement concerning the use of Microsoft Office:
Students can use the both in school and at home on a round-the-clock
basis. “Typically, if you want to use [Office] in two places, they want to
charge you for that privilege,” according to Gartner analyst Neil
MacDonald. As great an idea as this is, it will be difficult to run
applications like Excel or Word over 56Kbps dialup connections. Enter Cox
Business Services, which plans to push high-speed cable modem service to
the home to provide students with the required bandwidth. Alert SNS Reader
Andrew Hargreave also sent this item.
ComputerWorld
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A
Sneaky Way to Increase Wireless Revenue: Australian telecom Telstra sent voice messages to millions
of its mobile phone customers promoting a new service. Innovative
marketing, you say? Well, perhaps, but the company charged its customers
to retrieve the message. Any time you can get your customers to pay for
your marketing efforts, that’s a good thing, right? Wrong again, direct
marketing breath! This sort of thing is not unprecedented, however, as
many dialup Internet users have to pay to receive spam email, a fact that
has spawned many different bills in Congress aiming to clean up spam. I
guess our representatives better worry about voice spam as well.
Australian
Broadcasting Corporation
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Signs
You Live in the Year 2001: Here’s a bit of a giggle. I particularly like reason number
11: “Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the
first 20 or 30 years of your life, is cause for panic and turning around
to go get it.” I’ve been there.
Big Muddy
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New
Times, New Art: I
don’t know if the Surveillance Camera Players are still a going concern,
but I just love the concept: a troupe of players who put on little dramas
in front of surveillance cameras. Talk about narrowcasting! This is
performance art at its finest. Unfortunately, all the links to movies of
their performances, such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, performed
at the Astor Place subway station, Manhattan, don’t appear to work. But
their Web site was updated at the end of August, so perhaps we can hope
that the troupe is still out there keeping it real.
NotBored
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Loudcloud
Makin’ Some Noise:
Qwest Communications and Loudcloud inked a five year preferred partner
deal to co-market and sell each other's services. Loudcloud will host in
Qwest CyberCenters and use Qwest's network. Qwest expects the alliance to
generate about $260 million of service sales during the next five years.
As I have said in the past,
I don’t think telecoms will succeed in the ASP space without a lot of
help. Despite their considerable potential and many relevant capabilities,
telecoms lack several key assets, like customer service and an understanding
of business applications other than voice. Qwest is one of the most
clueful Baby Bells, having been an entrepreneurial long distance
competitor before taking the baffling step of acquiring one of the most
clueless RBOCs, USWest. Loudcloud makes a good match, and I think they’re
feeling the heat of sky-high expectations (founded by Marc Andreesen) and
diminished accomplishments (after debuting at $6, Loudcloud is now trading
under two bucks). It remains to be seen whether this alliance will
succeed, but it looks like a smooth move for Qwest.
InternetWeek
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VoiceXML
2 held up for intellectual property issues: The more than 500 Voice XML Forum
members need to work out some way to cross license the technology. The
forum was started by AT&T, IBM, Lucent and Motorola two and a half
years ago to create a common specification for writing applications that
respond to voice control.
InfoWorld
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Report
from Burning Man: Alert
SNS Reader Andy Stevko took the plunge and visited the Burning Man
festival, a bustling temporary city of some 25,000+ people in the middle
of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada that has become the techies’
pilgrimage/Disneyland/end of summer bacchanal. Just like the bikers return
to Sturgis each year, so do
techies, artists, and fellow travelers return to the stinking alkali
desert to be “part of an experimental community, which challenges its
members to express themselves and rely on themselves to a degree that is
not normally encountered in one's day-to-day life.” The result is temporarily
Black Rock City, home to the Burning Man event. Frankly, the experience
can’t really be described, although Bruce Sterling took a great stab at
it, but Andy’s got pictures, at the link below.
Hotu-Matua
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