All About You

What we're about to do tends to anger some people and scare others. Standing on a freeway overpass, we picked a car at random and copied down the license number. We took that plate number to a local branch of the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles. For $4, the DMV dipped into its files and produced a copy of the vehicle registration. The car was registered to a husband and wife. DMV gave us their names and address. For three dollars more or we bought the information that appears on both their driver's licenses. Now we had dates of birth, heights and weights, and a confirmation of their home address. And for another six dollars, DMV mailed us their driving history for the last five years. Dull reading. No accidents, no tickets. Our next stop was the public library. You can have an unlisted phone number and still show up in Polk's guide to Portland. From Polk's we got the phone number and the husband's occupation. Better than that, our targets turned out to be members of an

old Portland family, a name most locals would recognize. That meant we could go to the card file of news stories from The Oregonian. More background and some good personal information including their favorite charities and the names of their kids. At the elections office. We checked voting records and learned their political affiliation: Republicans. As well as how long they had lived in Oregon and the names of their parents. From county records we learned they owned their own home, had bought it new, when they moved in, how much it was worth, and what they paid in property taxes. Our file was taking shape. There were no records of a divorce for either party which was a minor setback. Divorce proceedings are public record and they can be goldmines for personal information. But there were several lawsuits involving the business. More useful information. Most people assume their lives are private but that's not entirely true. We all have

a paper trail like this. Many of the basic facts which define our lives are public information. Anyone who wants it can get it. Our list of the usual sources included phonebooks, US District Court, bankruptcy court, professional organizations, Uniform Commercial Code filings, Anywhere we thought we might find public documents. Starting with a license plate, we built a dossier on two people we've never met. We know where they live. We know their business and its financial status. We know their religion. We've got a pretty good handle on the husband's health problems. We know the names of their grandchildren. We even have the basic floor plan of their house, all from public sources only. All in a half days effort, total expenses: $13. How you feel about people collecting this kind of information probably depends on how you feel about privacy in general. Certainly one Portland family has every right to resent

this file. In the next hour we're asking you to put yourself in their place, only imagine files that are bigger and more intrusive and all about you, your name and your age and your address. How much you make, the way you pay your bills, what you spend your money on, the state of your health, your tastes and beliefs the kind of person you are. Those files are real. Your files are thicker than this because there is far more information. Material about you is being bought and sold and used on a daily basis, usually without your permission or knowledge. Those files, computer files on you, aren't going into any shredder. Instead they're growing in size and in number. The people piecing together your dossiers take pride in their work. Unlike what we came away with in our half days effort, they know all about you. All About You:

what we know about what computers know about us. Recorded by John Tuttle. Hello I'm Pete Schulberg. John Tuttle and I worked together as television journalists for 15 years. When he died suddenly this summer, at the age of 49, he left behind many shocked and saddened friends in the press and in politics. He left behind a closet full of journalism's most prestigious awards and a hard won reputation as one of Oregon's best reporters. A man admired for his creativity and craftsmanship, for his honesty and fairness. John also left behind his final story: this documentary examining the modern assault on our privacy. He had completed almost all of it and his colleagues here at Oregon Public Broadcasting have used his notes and draft scripts to finish it for him. They asked me to guide you through the few sections he didn't have time to narrate himself. Very few of us knew about John's private battle

with leukemia until it took his life. He was a very private man and he felt a special passion about this story. He called it "All About You" but I think it also tells us a lot about him. [phone ringing] [woman] Knock knock. Hi. You've got a little bundle there. I've got a big bundle! I must correct you: I have a big boy here. You have a second or two? I have some information I need to ask you. Sure. Do you have a name picked out for him? Yep. Wilbur. W-I-L-B- U-R. Nelson. In an age of information, every newborn starts life with a name and a number. And do you want to have a Social Security card automatically issued for him?

The first number, the nine digits that will enable computers to track Wilbur Nelson Arrowsmith through the 21st century. Takes about three months if we do it, if you do it on your own you can do in a couple weeks, but you get to do your own paperwork. The social security number logs Wilbur on with the government and the next question determines just how fast his name finds its way into its first commercial computer database. Let's see, shall an abstract of the birth certificate be made available for public business or contact? No. Actually I want to tell you also this means you get more junk mail, he said yes. That's a negative? No, that's what I anticipate, I don't want any more junk mail. OK. It's kind of an invasion of your privacy if your phone rings and someone says "Hello? Mr. Arrowsmith?" I've never talked to him before. I don't care about them. They don't care about me, what they care about is Making a sale. Some commerce. We'll do our, we'll do our commerce in department stores and elsewhere. We feel it's, you know, I'll, I'll go and take care of it myself. I don't want my mailbox and my phone and all that, and said it's none of their business.

The Arrowsmiths have taken a stand on behalf of themselves and their new son. Like a lot of Oregonians this family simply wants to be left alone. He slept through your first interview. Way to go. The premise of this documentary is: try as the Arrowsmiths will, it can't be done. Just look around. Today we are all monitored and watched, and our activities are logged and recorded. We are photographed when we do business in convenience stores, and our pictures can be snapped when we step up to an ATM. We are watched everywhere we go in airports. And we've grown accustomed to handing off our luggage so strangers can look inside. Our youngsters think nothing of body searches before they're admitted to public concerts. Here at OPB we're accustomed to using magnetized cards that log our movements in and out of the doors.

Caller ID technology is being put into place at Oregon phone companies. If implemented, people will have our phone numbers and in some cases our names too even before they answer our calls. We know some interactive TV cable companies can look into our homes and see which channel we're tuned to on a minute by minute basis. And under certain circumstances even our garbage can be inspected, contents used in courts of law. All of these are inroads into our personal privacy. We are not being let alone. But by far the deepest intrusions into our personal lives today are by machines, by computers and by databases. Our names and the details of our lives find their way into computer files, files by the dozens, more likely files by the hundreds. There is an industry of data harvesters that work around us, piecing together electronic portraits of each of us. Much of what they collect is inconsequential

details about us as individuals. Some of it is broad generalities, but some of it is private and personal. The problem I think is that in this world of information explosion that people are really not, still not aware that other individuals and organizations are keeping records about them. What the data harvesters collect they use. They buy information, they sell it, trade it and make decisions about us based on what they know, or think they know. "There are far too many loopholes in what's going on. Far too much bad information being passed around, far too many electronic rumors being spread." The details of our lives go into their databases without our permission. And when the computer information on us is wrong, we are the victims. Other people read and use files about us that we don't even know exist. [Man] What you'll find is a lot of people being misrepresented in cyberspace. That's... sorry for introducing that term, that's the, the electronic

representation of you and I, which already exist - you can't say I don't want an electronic representation, it's already there." Remember how we began our file on our unnamed motorist? We started with a database at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The question of access to DMV records came up in the last Oregon legislature. "And I started investigating the situation here in Oregon and found out it's pretty much an open book here in Oregon for access to information. If I saw an expensive vehicle driving down the road I could look at the license plate number and, if I had the proper fee, go to the Department of Vehicles and find out who the owner is and where they live and everything about them basically." "Good morning, Motor Vehicles, Betty." Every year Oregon's DMV brings in over two and a half million dollars selling the information it keeps on Oregon cars and drivers. "What's the license number on the vehicle?" Buyers range from detectives to private citizens to direct mail advertisers.

In Senate hearings an employee with the Department of Human Resources argued the information is also going to criminals. "We have a lot of contact with drug and alcohol affected clients and those also who have... many who have psychiatric disorders. Some examples of my own experiences: I had a client who called DMV directly trying to get my name and address and he had threatened to blow my house up. He also threatened another [obscured by cough] at CSD at the Marion County branch that he wanted to blow her home up as well and was also attempting to get her address through DMV." In the same hearing, a name familiar to many Oregonians came up: Rebecca Schaeffer. Rebecca Schaeffer was a young and rising star, 21 years old, featured in movies and in the TV series "My Sister Sam", ran on CBS from 1986 to 1988. Early yesterday morning someone went to her Los Angeles apartment, knocked on her door, and shot her in the chest. Police in Los Angeles think that someone may be this man, nineteen year old Robert Bardo of Tucson. Investigators say he

was an obsessive fan of Schaeffer's. Rebecca Schaeffer was a Portlander. Her mother Danna still lives in Laurelhurst. [Danna Schaeffer] What I have been told is that he consulted a private detective in Arizona and that private detective agency had an account with another agency in California who had a running account with the Department of Motor Vehicles. And when he asked for Rebecca's address, everything worked smoothly and he was able to get it very quickly." Today Hollywood celebrities supported a legislative effort to reduce public access through driver's licenses. If the bill passes you'd be able to withhold your home address and phone number from the DMV files. The DMV could not sell that information to anyone, nor could private computers access it. "Right after Rebecca was murdered there was a great hue and cry, and people were very concerned that their names and addresses were going to be available and in fact they didn't realize that they were

available so easily. So California passed a law, which in fact they called the Schaeffer bill, restricting information through the availability of information from DMV. Last June the 1991 legislature adjourned without passing a Schaeffer bill for Oregon. Under existing law, police and corrections officers can ask DMV not to give out their home addresses. The lawmakers extended that right to judges, district attorneys and human resource workers. DMV information on the rest of us, names and addresses, remains public record. "Every bureaucracy, if it's a public bureaucracy or a private bureaucracy, whatever else it does, is an information machine." George Beard is one of the people planning the computerization of Oregon's records and already computers have changed bureaucracies forever. Files like DMV's were once kept in oak file drawers filled with millions of handwritten or typed paper forms. A generation ago that change began.

Today, believe it or not, with computers, many facets of local state and federal government are genuinely more efficient. Today's clerks have access to enormous pools of information and they actually move it at the speed of light. But that new ease of handling this also made government a glutton for information. It's always asking for more. What about the individual who's concerned? What about the person who says "I want to know what you know about me. I want a list." What do you, what do you tell them? Party line we can tell them that, the good news is that they're not only entitled to ask that question but under Oregon's public records law we're required to give that to them. The bad news part of the formula is that it's incumbent today on the citizen really to find out to do the discovery on their own, and state

government is a very large, very complex organization. So hypothetically it would require John Tuttle to call, write, or visit all of the different departments and essentially poll them and say "Do you have any information on me?" How many is that? I know it's over 100. I heard from one source that there are up to 170 different agencies, boards, and commissions. The comforting truth is not every state entity has a file on every Oregonian. Few of us should expect to find our names on file at the state potato commission. At the federal level we all know social security as our name and number and so does internal revenue. But who else? The last accurate and official account we could find is nearly 10 years old. And in 1982 the federal government was maintaining three billion five hundred and thirty thousand files on American citizens, 15 federal files for each of us back in 1982. Since then we don't know any reason to believe the number of

files has done anything but grow. And who's reading the files? At the state level, with DMV, practically everybody. Records like DMV, court and property records, combined with federal census materials and postal information, combined with the white pages of the phone book. That's what we use to build our file. That's where the data harvesters start too. What they used to call mail order is direct marketing today. Jim Williams, the head of Oregon's direct marketing association. "A marketer typically will do research, study his product, the product he's trying to sell, decide who is the best potential customer for that product by demographic and psychographic data, basically draw a profile of a person. Then they go shopping for that person.

You can find the clues to your personal demographic and psychographic profile in your mailbox. The ads and offers you get are addressed to the person the data harvesters think you are based on what they know about you. Every time an American, actually almost any human in the world anymore, fills out a form that has your name or any information about you at all, that oftentimes, in fact I would say more often than not anymore, that information is traded. Some, you know, that's big business. Governments do it. Businesses do it. Your church does it. Everyone trades this information. So where we get that information is, is primarily from the person themselves. When they take out a loan, buy a car, buy a house, rent an apartment, shop at Safeway, take your pick. Every time you sign any information on a piece of paper there is a very good chance that information is going to be used and traded back and forth. Much of this information is volunteered. Some of us seem ready to tell anybody

anything. Those surveys we get in the mail or folded into our daily newspapers routinely ask questions many of us wouldn't pose to our closest friends. Are you pregnant? Do you have epilepsy? What kind of laxative do you use and how often? Are you having problems with bladder control? What's your house worth? How much money do you make? How much do you owe on your credit cards? Do you have false teeth? The tabulated information, everything we're willing to reveal, goes into files with our names on it. And that's just one source. We all know mail order houses and magazines sell lists to their customers and subscribers, names and addresses, and politicians and charities sell lists of their supporters. And U.S. post office sells lists of every address change. It even happens here at OPB. OPB doesn't sell but it does trade lists of the names of people who contribute to public broadcasting. You can find lists for just about anything you want in terms of Americans in their categories.

People who like monogrammed toilet paper, I mean, really. People who like special types of recipes, people who like buying doodads for their cars, all kinds of hobbyists. People according to profession, people according to you know, the type of business. People according to, you know, the kinds of pets they like, goldfish versus cats. Naturally enough, you can even get lists of lists. Want a list of gay or lesbian Americans? How about a list of people with Jewish or Catholic last names? Interested in the names of people who've subscribed to a magazine called Sex over 40? Or maybe you need a list of the countries hog farmers. [Man] Well the fact of matter is these guys aren't out there generating this information about you. I mean it's out there. They're just collecting it and using it. Often the information being collected comes from sources you would never expect. For example Dart maintains its own mailing list and operates a Portland printing plant sending out direct mail advertising. Dart's selling point is how much it

knows about target customers, and the company, a subsidiary of Portland General Electric, has built its mailing list by following the power line into your home. Working with a company called Equifax, PGE has analyzed its Portland and Salem area customer lists and categorized them by zip code plus 4. According to manager Andy Carr, the 9 digit zip code narrows a neighborhood to 10 to 15 houses. And boils it down into a kind of a snapshot of what your neighborhood looks like, your neighborhood being your zip plus four. Dart promises a snapshot of characteristics neighbors share: in age, education, income, family and shopping habits, and it will target direct mailing to that profile. Some details of that snapshot are assumptions, others are hard fact. If you're a PGE customer, Equifax has checked your personal credit history in

deciding which of 50 categories best describes you. A lot of people don't like the names. You need to realize "midlife success", "good family times", "comfortable times", "movers and shakers", "home sweet home", "family ties", "middle years", "stars and stripes", "young and carefree", "social security"... Mr. Carr's neighborhood, zip code 9 7 2 3 0 1 4 1 6, for example, is classified as "comfortable times". The demographics say Carr and his neighbors are in sales or technical fields as managers and professionals. The people who live here have high incomes, medium high educations, and low to medium credit activity. There are more than a half million people in the PGE service area and all but a few thousand of us have been investigated and classified. Not just where we live, but who we are, and the kinds of purchases we're likely to make. Now we don't know those individuals on an individual basis, but we

know that they tend to live in these kind of houses and in these kind of neighborhoods and can then target them based on that information as opposed to the individual. So there is still a maintenance of your privacy in some sense, in that we aren't targeting you based on the fact that you earn forty two thousand five hundred dollars a year. Only the likelihood. Only the likelihood that you do that. If you call PGE the company will take you off their Dart mailing lists. What the company won't do is tell you which category you fit into on the Dart list, whether you're a bedrock American, a successful single, a struggling minority mix, or which of the 47 others. When you dial an eight or nine hundred number the people on the other end can automatically get your phone number, and with the number they can get your name and address. Remember this ad?

Call 1 800 9 6 2 1 2 3 4 for information on the pollen count in your area. The free pollen count information was part of a Warner-Lambert campaign to sell patent medicine. When you dialed their 800 number Benadryl identified you as a potential customer. You went into their files and the company mailed you a coupon for their product. Those coupons you get in the mail often tell more than meets the eye. Depending on who generated those coupons, that coupon will have a small barcode on it and that barcode will have information about you. It oftentimes will have your name. You're being used in a test. So you walk into your local supermarket, Safeway, you know, Freddie's, whatever, they process this coupon, as you use it it goes back to these people, they run it through their computer, collect all the information on it. Well, the fact that you used it tells them a lot because, the fact that they had you in their list in the first place, they already have a fair amount of information on you, so they know that, hey, this is a person in this category that's using this product,

therefore perhaps someone else like him in another category might use this product. The offers you get for credit cards in the mail are the result of pre-screening. Banks you've never heard of have bought an analysis of your personal credit history. You get the pre-approved offer of a credit card because of what they already know about you. In Food 4 Less stores from Medford to Tacoma, shoppers are offered ESP cards. Customers who sign up for the card give the store their name, address and phone number. By signing, they also agree the store can record and use the collected information. Barcodes on products identify what the customer buys. The barcode on the card identifies the customer. At across the aisle from the check stands, a computer ties the two together. Your name and your shopping list. We will have information that will tell us what you buy, where your your address is at,

what things you generally buy every time you come in, how many you buy, how much you spend on the ESP, how much you don't spend on the ESP. Pretty much itemize everything down in columns for them. Do whatever you want with it. Your name, your address, and a list of every item you buy at the grocery, down to the last can of tuna fish. In some cities stores with this equipment sell what they know to marketers. Food 4 Less may know all about its customers but it says the information it collects stays in the stores. Last May, Oregon's direct mailers held a one day conference at the convention center where experts talked techniques and technology. How much the marketers know remains a selling point. Do you like skiing? We know about it. They know it because computers let marketers pile one piece of information on top of another. The word they use is overlap.

There's just so many different pieces of data get gathered on you, just about every day, day, and somehow gets funneled into, for example, when you move. We know you moved. You fill out a change of address with the post office. That comes straight to us. You key in every phone book in the United States. And then you overlay it with census information financial data. There's about 30 different overlays, to the point where you've got a really good profile on the individual. Computers mean marketers don't just overlay mountains of data. Today it can be whole mountain ranges. You can get a list of all people between ages 35 and 40 that have $50,000 a year income. They have children at home between ages 2 and 6, that have a red Ferrari, that like to ski, snd have a dog named Boo. How much information is too much? If there is a line, where is it to be drawn? It wasn't a major topic at the Oregon conference but it was the question we posed to the keynote

speaker James Rosenfield. "I personally don't want either the government or big business to know anything more about me than: my name is Jim, I live in Carlsbad, California, we own a couple cats, that's OK, we don't have any kids, that's OK. You can infer things about my income from where I live, it's ok to know my occupation, I mean I'm not ashamed of it. And, you know, beyond that I'm not sure it's any of your business, I mean..." Rosenfield told producer Jeff Guardalabene there should be provision for people who say "none of this is any of your business". "But there has to be a mechanism. If you do object to marketers knowing that, there does have to be a mechanism where you can say, "hey, I don't want you guys to know a thing about me". I think that's totally legitimate and I think there does need to be a mechanism for that." In fact, the mechanism doesn't exist today. And some marketers will even admit it. "If you want to have your name taken off a list or, as far as that goes, any list, you can call the Direct Marketing Association in New York and, which I have the phone number, and stuff,

and they'll take you off the list, until you buy something else." "Until you buy something, and then you go right back?" "That's right, if you buy a major appliance or anything, they sell their lists and there's more demographic lifestyles that start coming into that." "What if a person was adamant? What if they were really furious about that? They don't have any alternative, do they?" "Not really. You know, it's... don't buy anything. Or if you do buy something, don't give any information out." The latest developments in direct marketing are technological, new and better ways to store and access more information from bigger lists with compact discs. For example, the US Post Office now offers all U.S. addresses on a single CD- ROM. "It's astonishing and this is the whole country on a single disc?" "This is the whole, this is the entire country on one disc. You're all on this disc. Guarantee, you are on this disc." Direct mailers buy this CD from the post office.

The price is $800 for the entire country and it's updated every three months. All of the country's phonebooks, that's four thousand of them, can be reproduced on just two CDs. "Summit Search." Using this tool, a Banks, Oregon businessman has opened Summit Search. With a phone call, he can help you locate anyone you're looking for: Schoolmates, old boyfriends, or service buddies. "My name is Mike. Let me tell you how it works. We're using a computer to search the equivalent of every telephone directory in the country. So you would give us a name, and hopefully it's not a common name, we would print out a list of everyone with that name, and the list contains the phone number and the address of each person. Then we ship that list to you COD for $25. OK, on the eastern disc we have 36 Edward Colliers." Because the information is drawn from driver's license information, from the Post Office, and other public sources, having an unlisted phone number won't keep you off this list.

"Y-E-N-O-U-R. I only have one person in the whole western U.S. with that last name." The current edition of the discs contains the names of 90 million Americans and with every update the list grows. "Yeah, I'm not sure. Who knows what's going to happen in the future as far as technology. It just amazes me." Lotus, the computer software company, combined with Equifax to create Marketplace. Using CD storage and targeting by address, sex, and marital status, plus income, and interests, Marketplace combined information from a variety of sources to build data portraits of 120 million American consumers. A demonstration disc showed how a maker of children's clothing looking for mail order customers could zero in on the San Francisco Bay Area, on specific counties, on specific incomes, on people who have children, and finally a characteristic called purchasing propensity. Protests, many from computer

professionals, convinced Lotus to drop out of the Marketplace project. But the technology remains. "It was just a visible product that was shelved because some people got upset, and, if these people are upset about that, they don't want to know what else is going on." What direct markers have done, and what we all may have to do eventually, is change our attitudes about information. Forget about cold hard facts, or columns of names and numbers. Don't think of it as bits of electronic signals compiled in a computer. Some of the experts we talked to told us raw information comes close to having an existence of its own. "Information is dynamic, it's almost living. You have to keep it up to date all the time. The information circulates around, it's, it's almost like the blood system in an animal. I mean it flows, it's, it's what keeps things moving almost."

David Blizzard is a computer professional who teaches at Portland Community College. "As a teacher of computer concepts, beginning concepts, I'm completely amazed at the number of people that are still completely illiterate about the capabilities of computers and what they can do and what they can keep. Um, I think a lot of people, oh, these are just words to them, they don't think that it has a great deal of reality relative to them, but in fact, there is information about everybody. There's information kept about everybody." There are medical information bureaus that compile their own medical histories on millions of Americans. Insurance companies read those files and the information they collect may decide whether you get a policy. There are companies that specialize in compiling their own lists of the names of people who filed claims with

workman's compensation and who sell those files to prospective employers. At stake here is whether you get a job. There are landlord tenant databases with private files on the payment and behavior history of renters. Unfavorable material in their computers can mean you don't get a place to live. But by far the biggest and most influential files are the ones on our personal finances. Before he was a teacher, David Blizzard worked with computers in banks where some of his attitudes changed. "I know that the information was sent to credit bureaus, That you could buy whatever information you wanted from the bank. There were more stringent laws about the sharing of information, for instance, between the trust department and the commercial side of the bank than there were in sharing information with the outside world. We're talking about payment history. We're talking about a credit payment history on installment loans,

on commercial loans, on checking account information, we're talking about savings account information. All this information is now accessible through a terminal. All the information about an individual is accessible in a real time basis from a terminal at any particular, at any one of the branches in any bank. You can get to everything at once." Every time you use a credit card you add detail to an electronic self-portrait. Credit bureau computers compile our credit histories based on monthly updates filed by stores, banks, finance, and mortgage companies. When we apply for credit, the applications usually allow the lender to look into our credit report with the credit bureau, and despite the precision of today's state-of-the-art computers, there is evidence to believe the bureaus do less than a perfect job. "I would say that I have never seen a credit report that does not have at least one mistake on it." "Is that right?" "And that's, that's honest, whether it be in your Social Security, whether it be your date of birth, the

spelling of your name, whether it be your address, whether it be your pain history or your spouse." Should it worry you if credit bureaus don't keep their facts straight? Nicole Bay, manager of a Portland business that represents consumers in battles with credit bureaus, she knows credit reports are used for more than just borrowing money. "A lot of people don't realize that one of the newest things to do for companies is to check your credit prior to hiring you. Now this is a scary thing considering that if you have negative or misleading information on your credit report you don't know about, you could easily be denied employment because of something you weren't aware of. They can also keep you from getting a house, from getting a second mortgage on your home, from buying a car, from acquiring credit cards." When John and Patty Siegel of Eugene applied for a mortgage to buy this house, problems arose on a credit report. "Two major items came up, one that Patty had apparently been married and

legally divorced." The truth is Patty Siegel wasn't divorced and there was no previous marriage, but the faulty information in the report put her in the position of explaining that to the bank, and to John. "The other was a civil lawsuit filed against Patty for $200000." The report was wrong on that too. Eventually, the Seigel's got their house but, according to Patty Siegel, the reporting agency never acknowledged its mistakes. "And it did say on the report that we got that they are not responsible for the accuracy." That part of the report was correct. The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows you to order your own credit reports and check them for accuracy. In Oregon, the price to find out what the credit bureaus are telling other people about you is $15 a report. Three credit bureaus: Equifax, TRW, and TransUnion, dominate the industry, so to get three reports you end up paying $45. It cost me $45 to learn that, in my case,

two of the three reports were wrong, carrying accounts and unpaid balances for credit cards that weren't mine. The man who shot this documentary has a worse story. "I learned that there is a financial shadow of me out there that somebody else controls that I have absolutely no control over." Six years ago, John Booth took out a loan to buy a car but somehow the lender failed to credit him with $30 in payments. The next time John tried to get credit he was turned down. "I went to the source of the problem, which was a bank, told them about the problem, and then every two years had to retell them about the problem. They continued to tell me, 'Oh it's fixed' and it wasn't fixed. It's following me around." The bank even put it in writing admitting the mistake, but when John applied for credit cards the credit bureau records continued to show an unpaid debt. And John was rejected. "I went to the source of the problem, squelched it supposedly, and then everywhere I go there's some other credit bureau or record

that has a form of that mistake." This year John sent copies of the bank letter to the credit bureaus along with a threat of legal action. And as far as he knows the error has finally been erased. "The initial error was approximately a total of $32." "How long have you been fighting this?" "I've been fighting it, as far as I can figure, six years." How could something like that happen? For an answer, we turned to Steve Biederman with the Portland chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Data can become, information can become, nearly immortal in that there is no one repository for it. If someone, if some credit bureau, gets an incorrect piece of information about me in their computer and then if that credit bureau then shares that information with other credit bureaus, which then shares it with other businesses etc., that information is now stored on many, many computers and it's extraordinarily easy to recreate information on the computer. It can be recreated at the speed of light. Thousands

of copies. And so even if I managed to track down the original credit bureau and tell them 'your information on me is wrong, please fix it', they can fix their copy of it, but the data has been spread all over the world, conceivably. It's rather like trying to track down and stop a rumor. You can go to the person who originally started the rumor and tell them, 'this is gossip, this is not true' and in fact convince them, they'll say, 'well, I'll stop repeating it.' But, if everyone in town's heard it and is ready to spread it some more, it's almost impossible to track it down, and that's a concern." "The current law: lives of consumers are an open book." This June in Washington D.C., a House subcommittee held hearings on a series of bills to tighten controls on credit bureaus. "Sensitive personal financial data is bought and sold without consumers' knowledge or consent. Workers are denied employment or even blackballed because of information placed in their files, and inaccurate credit information is difficult, if not impossible, to remove from a consumer's record."

[Background reading continues][Tuttle] Two years ago similar hearings had centered on questions of consumer privacy. This time the major concern was accuracy of reporting. [Representative Schumer] People wrongfully fired, insurance rates raised, loans denied, all because of credit file errors which the industry does not work to correct. Simply put, Mr. Chairman, the credit reporting industry is out of control." [Tuttle] Representatives of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group said of the complainants it interviewed, more than half had to contact a credit bureau five times or more before mistakes were corrected. The average time to iron out a complaint was almost six months. A survey by the publishers of Consumer Reports found errors in almost half of all credit reports. Nearly one in five, what CU called a major inaccuracy. Gregory N. Evans described every consumer's nightmare. Someone with the same name ran up big bills but the credit bureau reports blamed him. [Evans] I then immediately call up these people, I said,

"There is a mistake on my credit report. I need to get this cleared up. It's not my fault. I didn't do it. I didn't make the error. You guys made the error. You fix it." Click. They hung up on me." [Tuttle] Evans says it took 10 months to get the errors erased and he thinks he knows why it didn't take even longer. [Evans] About two days before I came up here to the hearing, I did get a clear TransUnion report and I think it's, it's interesting that I was asked to be on Ted Koppel's Nightline Report and all of this resolution of the problem with TransUnion came very quickly after I started to mention that. [Tuttle] Credit bureaus, of course, are not without friends and defenders, both within the industry and Congress. "Again, somehow in today's climate bashing credit bureaus seems to be fashionable. [Representative Barnard] Given the millions of successful credit transactions that occur,

You can argue that the system works quite well." [Schulberg] The industry's own statistics point to a high level of accuracy. Less than one half of one percent error rate based on the 9 million queries it receives every year. [Oscar Marquis] None of the millions of consumers who are well served by the system are here today to testify, or are reported on in the media. That's simply not news." [Walter Kurth] The objective facts prove that we have done and continue to do our job very well. 150 million credit-active Americans benefit from the opportunities made possible by credit extension." [Marquis] Another area of concern involves consumer privacy. How well do we protect against impermissible access to consumer reports? Can reports be obtained by anyone on anyone? TransUnion's answer to you is no. Getting a consumer report for an impermissible purpose is not easy, although it can happen. [Schulberg] "It can happen, and it is happening," wrote John Tuttle in this unfinished section of his documentary. John's research on this

question of computer security led him to this 1989 cover story in Business Week magazine which made national headlines when it gained access to credit information on Vice President Dan Quayle. The reporter was Jeffrey Rothfeder. [Rothfeder] One of the things I did was got Dan Quayle's credit report in order to prove that nothing is private and that, that was, it's as easy to get John Tuttle as Dan Quayle, I mean that's, that's what it comes down to." [Schulberg] Security is still as lax. Two years later, working at a personal computer in his home in New Jersey, Rothfeder demonstrated at John's request how he could get John's financial records. [Rothfeder] With just the name and address, just taking the name John Tuttle and the, and his address, which was supplied to me, um, I was able to get, uh, a random credit report and through that I got his birthday, his social security number, where he works, the name of his wife, and then a list of all his credit cards, credit balance he owes on, on all of them. Also names of auto loans he's had in the past and what he owes on them,

and that I took that information specifically with his social security number and ran off his bank records which included, you know, the name of his bank, the branch that he banks in, the phone number of that branch, checking account number, savings account number, and the balance for each of those accounts. And then I took that information and, specifically in this case his address and birthday, that helps for this, and ran off his, got his telephone number, which was an unlisted number. Found out the phone is in the name of his wife and then ran off the phone calls that they've made recently, the toll calls, the long distance calls that they've made and all of that basically, I'd say into a half hour to an hour in terms of work time on the computer." [Schulberg] Rothfeder explained he gained access to John's records through information brokers, not directly from John's bank, the telephone company, or one of the major credit bureaus. [Rothfeder] They're just not going to sell it to you. They've got their security procedures. Unfortunately, they sell it to many, many other people that then resell it out there. So there's this really an incredible information underground that's developed around this. And the more you meet these people, they're really fascinating

people, because that's all they do is sell information all day and for a profit, you know, and they'll sell you anything you want to get at." [Schulberg] There are nearly 30 million home computers in use in the United States today. Clearly, what Rothfeder can do others can do. [Rothfeder] To the person who wants it, outside, you can get anything you want. I've never seen anything that you can't." [Schulberg] "Anyone who knows the system," John wrote, "knows it's a sieve. People are buying the information and others are stealing it. You're beginning to recognize the individual who has the least access to the information. It's a face you see in the mirror every day. The question is obvious. What's a person to do until help arrives?" [Tuttle] In a world full of computer illiterates there are also people, like Randal Schwartz, who've grown up understanding computers. As a computer security consultant, part of Schwartz' work is

looking for loopholes. [Schwartz] Most people, I'll say, don't know the value of having two numbers next to each other. The value of two numbers next to each other, or a name and a number in a number, or a name and a number even sometimes, on one document, then allows a correlation. It allows somebody who has one half of the set to get to the other half. That's really important. If you are required to put a lot of pieces of information on the same piece of paper, that's dangerous. You should raise your ear and go "Do you really need all this information?" [Tuttle] Data harvesting and creating computer overlays depends on matching pieces of information: Names, addresses, numbers. It's common sense. The less you tell, the fewer correlations they can make. When you can avoid it, don't fill out forms. When asked for personal information, give as little as possible. Computer professional Steve Biederman: [Beiderman] It has made a change in the way I lead my life. One is that I'm just plain more careful about giving out information. Um, if I get an application that asks me for all sorts of

personal information and I can't see a reason why--Blockbuster Video, probably shouldn't give a specific name--why, why some company wants my income, I will attempt to fill out the informational, only the information that I think they truly need and give them back this application and see if they object, or not. See if they say, "Oh no, we must have that in order to process it," and then, at least if they say that, I know that I can make that choice OK. Am I willing to divulge this or not." [Tuttle] Just how little you tell the data harvesters depends on how strongly you feel about what they do. Randal Schwartz, for example, takes a hard line and refuses to give his phone number in some over-the-counter purchases. [Schwartz] I refuse because I know what they do with the phone numbers. They sell those phone numbers to telemarketers. I hardly ever get telemarketing calls. If the sales clerk wants the phone number and insists that I put it down there I put 555-1212, and if somebody presses on that, I go "Look, my number's in the phonebook. If you really need my phone number you can call directory assistance and get it." So that's why I put that there.

[Tuttle] Another alternative you may want to consider is when you're asked for more than you feel is appropriate, Maybe it's time to start lying. Again, David Blizzard. [Blizzard] I address those by not, by, either filling out false information or by not filling out any information at all. [Tuttle] What's the advantage to putting false information? [Blizzard] The advantage to having false information is that if the information is being gathered, they get conflicting information and if it's conflicting information maybe no information will go on at all." [Tuttle] If the idea of conflicting information appeals to you, there is a logical place to start. [Blizzard] Social Security numbers all the time, here and there and here and there, if it's on an application you you, you need do what you need to do." [Tuttle] You can put down the wrong number. [Blizzard] You can put down the wrong number. You can put down the wrong number. There's no, there's no law against forgetting a digit here and there." [Tuttle] There are a few places... [Blizzard] You can't. [Tuttle] Your taxes... [Blizzard] Your taxes and your

W-4 form and stuff like that, you don't mess around with, but somebody wants my social security number at, over at someplace where I buy tires, I don't give it to him. I just don't give it to him or I put down something wrong. If they want to have something there, then I'll put down something there, but I don't want that- I don't want that information being tagged and associated with me. I don't want to get more junk mail. [Tuttle] But further steps you take depends on the value you place on personal privacy. Remember David Blizzard used to work in a bank. [Blizzard] As a consequence, and because I value my privacy, I've decided that, to a large extent, to conduct my business affairs outside of the bank. Which means that a lot of our payments of this and that and this and that are done with cash. I'd just as soon not know, not have the bank and everybody know where all my output goes."

[Tuttle] Paying cash of course means it won't show up on your credit reports. As for finding out what is on that report, keep in mind that if you're turned down for credit you're eligible for a free credit report. Randal Schwartz suggests occasionally applying for credit you know you can't get. [Schwartz] I have an interesting mechanism that was taught to me a long time ago by one of my friends. When I want to find out my credit rating. And I don't want to pay the 15 bucks, I apply for credit. I even grab one of those American Express things that you see in the, uh, in the uh, uh, stores. They're all over the place. They even have a postage paid return thing on it. I don't even have to, like, put a stamp on that. I go and I fill out the credit and, uh, I apply for like a platinum card or something, something that is beyond my range and my current credit rating. OK? Now American Express turns me down. Hey, amazing, I mean that's hard to believe, but I guess they did. OK. What they send me is a rejection letter. That rejection letter is gold. [Tuttle] With a rejection letter, Schwartz has 60 days to write the credit bureau demanding a free copy of his credit

report. Individuals who choose to opt out of the data harvest can write the Direct Marketing Association. It takes two letters. One for direct mail, one for telemarketers, the salespeople who phone you at home. That association suggests you renew your request every year and it makes no guarantees that all advertisers and sales people will honor your request. If you missed that address you can always get it by calling any direct mail company in the Yellow Pages. They'd probably love to hear from you. If you want Oregon DMV to stop giving out your name to direct mail advertisers fill out a mail in one of these cards you pick up at any branch office. Lawyers, collection agencies, and reporters, will still be able to access the state's information on you, but it may cut your junk mail. If you can prove a life-threatening situation, DMV will refuse the information to everyone but you need hard evidence to make your case. There is also a growing number of businesses and agencies, including OPB, which

offer a checkoff option. If you don't want your name sold or traded, they pledge not to do it. And, the nation's leading credit bureaus are promising a new service. At your request, they will bar pre-screening of your personal credit information. That means companies can't check your financial situation without your permission. It means no more offers of pre-approved credit cards in the mail. The fact the service is available, is a minor but heartening sign that people's privacy can be respected in an age of information. [Schwartz] People should argue for, and write their congressman about, and get together about, having similar Acts to the Fair Credit Act of 1980 be established for all databases so that I, as an individual, have the right to inspect any piece of information that's being maintained electronically about me. I need to have that right." "It's as if we are creating an electronic persona for everyone that exists

only within the machines. And it's sort of a clone of us, but there's mistakes in the cloning process and we should be allowed to examine those mistakes and correct them. That's what people can do. That's what the public can do, is they can argue for that right." [Tuttle] Do you think it's possible to live a private life today? [Blizzard] No, I don't think it's possible to live a private life today. I think it's, it's almost impossible. It's- in order to live a fully functional in this society life, it's impossible to live a private life." [Tuttle] Are we moving towards a master computer file on all of us? [Schwartz] Now what we're moving towards is enough distributed databases that you won't be able to know where all the information is. That's scarier. I wouldn't mind one master database that I had legal access to, where I could say this piece of information is incorrect, has been incorrectly inserted about me, was obtained under false circumstances, whatever.

I wouldn't mind having a master database that had that kind of information in it. But because now I have maybe 5000 different databases that have my name in it with potentially incorrect information misrepresenting me to other people and getting spread around like the computer viruses, because that's out there. That scares me more." [Schulberg] This is where the story ended in Jon Tuttle's scripts for this documentary, located just after his death in July. But several weeks later, a computer disc was discovered tucked away in John's files. It was labeled "The End." On that disk were John's final thoughts for this documentary. As far as we know, this is the last thing he wrote. "The future may be thousands of databases on each of us. Every one of them full of fact and misinformation that is traded, bought, and sold, and on occasions stolen, too. Maybe we should be flattered that they go to the trouble. It is astonishing that strangers could know so much about us, especially, when all that some of us want them to know

is that we want them out of our lives."