Evan Hendricks Quotes
If information is collected, it will be compromised. People have no idea of the way that data collected for one purpose may be used for another.
Evan Hendricks, Editor/Publisher and founder of Privacy Times, PBS Evening News, April 11, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In Russia, with its authoritarian tradition and secret police, people have little expectation of privacy. Kaspersky was here referring to Europe and America as well as Russia.
He was referring to all the data that health insurance companies, retail stores, vendors such as Amazon.com, credit reporting companies, maintain on most Americans. He made the pint that private sources maintain much more private information on Americans than does the government. People acquiesce as they perceive some benefit.
The large credit reporting and data gathering companies collected information on Americans without their consent and then sold their information through “data brokers” to companies who would then try and sell products and services based on the information they obtained. In many cases the brokers sold the information to fraudulent operations who swindled or committed fraud against the names they bought. When members of Congress investigated the industry, the companies who collected the data claimed that they had no idea that there were consumer rip offs they were facilitating and claimed to have “rules” that prevented such use. But they said that they could not possibly know what the data brokers were doing as they were independent companies.
Almost no members of Congress has been trained in modern digital science and technology, and neither have their staff people. The result is that they have to depend on people for information and understanding who have vested interests which is not very desirable for objective legislating.
Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.
