Privacy Issues

Ethics for the Information Age Chapter 5

I found the section about privacy and trust very interesting. Privacy is on the rise in our society. One-family homes, televisions, automobiles, and other things allow us to go about our daily lives without interacting with many people. The "small town" feeling in which everybody in the community knows everybody else and what they do is on the decline (although not entirely gone). However, with so much privacy, it can be hard to determine who to trust. A good example of this is credit reporting. Banks and other companies are in the business of lending money to people. However, if they just lent money to everybody, many people would not or could not be able to pay them back. Thus, credit agencies exist to keep track of pertinent information so banks can make informed decision when determining who to lend money to. The credit report exists as a form of trust between the bank and the customer. However, the trust comes at the expense of privacy. Sensistive personal information is collected and sold to organizations requesting it. Negative information is often recorded with little or no explanation. A person who has to pay late because of a crisis may look just like a person who was intentionally trying to steal. False information can easily makes its way onto the report and it is left to the customer to put the effort into removing it. There are many horror stories of people who have had false, negative information put into their credit report because of company errors. Companies refuse to admit mistakes and negative information can remain with little concern from the company who put it there. Credit reporting is meant to prevent untrustworthy people from lending money. However, credit reporting punishes trustworthy people and can often harm them. This violates the Kantian idea of never using people as means to justify an end.