Online Data Present A Privacy Minefield
Is privacy still possible? For a lot of people, the answer is no, as companies collect personal data in ever-increasing volumes. Take a site like NextMark.com.
It's a sort of "Google" for mailing lists, where more than 1,400 data vendors offer lists of names — hundreds of thousands of names at a time — all sliced and diced and searchable. If you're looking for a list of people with heart disease, you can find it here. Heart disease plus Hispanic plus over 50? Also available. This type of data has been for sale for a long time; even some public radio stations sell lists of their donors through the site.
What's changed is the speed with which information flows into databases like these. It used to come from sources such as magazine subscriptions and warranty cards. Now it's flowing from online sources — thousands of them — everything from gambling Web sites to dating services.
