Source
Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1997/Four11.com.Online.privac.html
Content
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.
Four11.com: Online privacy policies in real life
``` Feel free to repost this message where appropriate until August 1st, 1997.
Four11.com: Online privacy policies in real life
A few weeks ago, on the eve of the FTC hearings on online privacy, the Electronic Privacy Information Center released a study of 100 top Web sites. This study showed that even though many of these sites captured personal information, virtually none of them had privacy policies that complied with globally accepted fair information norms. Those that did have privacy policies rarely made them easy to find.
Nobody who uses the Internet regularly could be surprised by these results. Let us consider a case study in online privacy. Several months ago, I began receiving a flood of unsolicited messages asking me for my autograph. Given that I am not any sort of celebrity, the source of these messages was a mystery. The messages rarely mentioned my name or exhibited any knowledge of who I am. Some of them were form-letters (e.g., "our school is auctioning celebrity memorabilia to raise money"), and at least one contained a digitized photograph (which I thankfully did not have the software to display) of an actress who assured me that I was her biggest hero in the world and would I please get her a role in a movie. This was all incredibly obnoxious. Finally I began asking the senders where they were getting my name. Usually I got no response, but eventually I got some replies mentioning amateur "e-mail addresses of the celebrities" Web sites.
Bad as it was, the problem soon became much worse, and after some research (including help from friends who have more time than I to resolve such mysteries) the problem was traced to a "celebrity e-mail addresses" service at http://www.four11.com. Four11.com is a company that runs a so-called "white pages" Web site that permits Internet users to look up personal information on a large number of people. The site is funded by advertising. If you dig deep in their Web site, below a list of their two dozen corporate partners, you will find the following statement:
Our Commitment to Privacy
Four11 is committed to protecting its customers' privacy. Anyone who does not want to be listed in either the telephone or email directory can request to be removed, and a separate database is maintained to prevent them from ever being accidentally re-added to the directory. In addition, Four11 has promised never to sell or trade its users' address information and believes it is essential to protect its users from unsolicited commercial e-mail and mass marketing.
My first move was to put this statement to the test. Having decided to advertise my name and e-mail address without my permission, the least they could do was to remove them from their site upon request. This did not happen. I sent approximately twenty messages over a three-month period, each time asking for my name to be removed from the four11.com site. Sometimes I got an automated promise of a reply. Sometimes I got no reply at all. Eventually I got a promise to remove my name and address from the site, but this promise was not fulfilled. Pressed for an explanation, they told me that they had removed me from the database and that my name would disappear from the site the next time the database was "compiled". I waited a week, then two, then three, and still my name and address were advertised on the four11.com site; I still received nuisance e-mail from people who were obviously spamming every "celebrity" address they could find. I wrote again and got no response, and again, and was told that my name was no longer in any four11.com database. This was an obvious falsehood, given that any child could say "lynx http://www.four11.com" and follow the "Celebrity" and "Authors/Journalists" links and find my name and my e-mail address.
Now I was getting mad. I wrote to the officers of the company (whose e-mail addresses I found using the four11.com service) and suggested that maybe they would like to get a batch of autograph requests themselves. Two of them replied, claiming that my name was not in their database. Finally, after another delay and another round of fruitless requests, I wrote to the president of the company and documented that my name and address were still appearing on their pages. A four11.com employee wrote back, claiming that my name would disappear from their site yesterday. This promise did not come true either, and as of this writing, my name and address continue to be advertised on the four11.com Web pages, provided that one looks at them using a text-based browser such as lynx. It would seem (if you believe their latest explanation) that they had forgotten to "compile" the text-based pages, but even when they had figured this out they still failed to comply with a specific promise to fix it.
We can learn some lessons here. One is that the world's best privacy policy is worthless unless it is followed. This kind of situation is precisely why most industrialized countries (and several others) have data protection laws. Such laws typically obligate organizations that keep personal data to register their databases and keep track of them. It's not good enough say, oops, sorry, we forgot about one of the databases in which we've been publishing your personal information on the World Wide Web for the past several months.
Another lesson is that lists of "celebrity" addresses are obnoxious. Big Hollywood stars have machinery to filter their mail and answer autograph requests. That's the business they're in. But many of the people who are indiscriminately added to these lists are normal people who live in apartments and answer their own mail as best they can. Being deemed a "celebrity" by some fool on the Internet, therefore, should not cause one to lose one's rights to privacy. And it is not reasonable for a company to profit by causing nuisances for innocent people.
In light of my experience, I do not think that four11.com can be trusted to protect anyone's privacy. I would urge you to write them at humans@four11.com and ask them to remove your name and all of your personal information from each of their databases, and not to re-add that information to their databases later on. I would also ask you to encourage them to shut down their "celebrity" pages until they have gotten specific permission from each individual whose address they are advertising. I have had to invest an unbelievable amount of time resolving this problem, and I can easily believe that many others are suffering silently because they do not have the time or technical skill to resolve it themselves.
Thanks very much
Phil Agre
I am writing on my own behalf only, and not to represent the views of my employer or anyone else. ```
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.