A woman in New York received a phone call from a man who was selling long-distance telephone services. When she told him that she only very rarely made long-distance calls, he said that telephone records showed she made frequent calls to Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware. The salesman hung up when the woman demanded to know how he had obtained her calling records. (Linowes 1993)
A man's wallet was stolen. The thief adopted his identity and became involved in a robbery and murder in Los Angeles. Later, when the real owner of the identity was stopped for a traffic violation, he was arrested because the Los Angeles Police Department's database identified him as a murder suspect. Although the man was released from jail within a few days, he was subsequently arrested five times in a period of fourteen months because of the same incorrect computer records. (Forester and Morrison 1994)
Computers make it possible to monitor the activities of people on the job on an unprecedented scale. At Electronic Banking System Inc., a "lockbox" service which processes payments and donations for companies and charities, computers measure the keystroke and error correction rates of data entry personnel. The pressure of the quotas (8500 keystrokes per hour), combined with other dehumanizing work conditions, causes tension, loneliness, stress-related illness, and feelings of paranoia. (Horowitz 1994) Electronic badges can track employee movements throughout the workday---including trips to the rest room. Email and voice mail can be read by employers.
Subscription lists to magazines, information from product registration cards, and records of credit card purchases are routinely sold to direct marketing organizations, which use the lists to mail advertisements directly to the homes of likely prospects.
Over 450 firms are engaged primarily in the business of buying, reprocessing, and selling data about individual Americans. The "big three" are the major credit bureaus, TRW Credit Data, Equifax, and Trans Union. (Forester and Morrison 1994) Together, these three credit bureaus maintain 400,000,000 credit records. (Laudon 1996)
Surveys of credit reports indicate that between 40 and 50 percent of reports from credit bureaus such as TRW Credit Data, Equifax, and Trans Union contain errors. A doctor in Norwich, Connecticut was refused a car loan because, according to his TRW credit report, he owed thousands of dollars in back taxes. When the bank investigated, it found that, because of an error by a TRW investigator, every taxpayer in Norwich was listed as having tax problems. (Linowes 1993)
The Medical Information Bureau (MIB) collects data from insurance companies and answers 15,000 inquiries per year. In one known case, a woman's MIB records incorrectly stated that she was HIV infected. Had she been denied life insurance on the basis of this misinformation, she probably would never have known the reason why. (Forester and Morrison 1994)
The FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) contains records on eight million Americans, or one out of every thirty citizens. (Forester and Morrison 1994)