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Miller's op-ed exhibited none of the conservative principles he so often writes about. Maybe that is why the Times printed his paean to new federal intervention in the private sector. If the proposal goes into effect, the increase in bureaucracy and taxes will be small but permanent, like it is with dozens of new regulations each year. Miller supports the FTC proposal because similar state and federal laws have been ineffective. This gives "There oughtta be a law!" a new twist: "There oughtta be another useless law!" And this law would be particularly unhelpful in Miller's case: It would not affect purely local marketing calls like the one that apparently upset baby's feeding schedule. But a further irony inhabits the FTC's telemarketing-sales rule. That is that the FTC proposes to create another government database as part of its "privacy" agenda. The FTC would collect and maintain the telephone numbers and other information about citizens who want to shield themselves from unwanted phone calls. Government benefits come with strings attached, and people who seek privacy should strangle on the anti-privacy apron strings of a national do-not-call database. Government database building is one of the greatest threats to privacy. Governments alone can take information from citizens by law. They alone can change the terms on which they use that information after it is collected — without asking permission, and without recourse for citizens who object. The term "privacy" has long been a stalking horse for all variety of ideological and special-interest groups. A group of left-wing privacy activists even support the FTC's new database — delighted, no doubt, by its wonderful anti-commercial potential. Confusion about privacy has rendered Congress, state legislatures, the press, and the public less able to find solutions to the many problems and legitimate concerns that popularly fall under the name "privacy." For example, identity fraud is widely perceived as a "privacy" problem. But it is better understood as a group of crimes that thrive on the use of personal identification and financial information. Because of this widespread misperception, the crimes that constitute identity fraud go poorly enforced while Congress considers banning many uses of Social Security numbers. Limiting SSN use would likely stifle many benefits that consumers and the economy enjoy without effectively reducing this serious crime problem. Similarly, unwanted commercial e-mail, or "spam," is an intrusion into electronic communications and a serious annoyance that is often labeled as a "privacy" problem. Spam exists in large part because e-mail marketers know little or nothing about the interests of potential customers. This is difficult to reconcile with the heart of the privacy concept, which is too much personal information being available too widely. Annoying though it may be, telemarketing is not really a privacy problem. And, for some people, it is not a problem at all. The reason the calls keep coming is that consumers keep buying. Thankfully, we do not need to rush collectively behind a federal agency's skirts to be free of telemarketing. Choice is available to all consumers thanks to a device called the TeleZapper. This dandy little product plugs into the phone jack and emits a special tone that tells computer dialers a number has been disconnected. The computer drops the call and removes the number from lists that are reused and resold. A few weeks of TeleZapping reduces floods of telemarketing calls to a trickle. Most importantly, nobody gets to collect reliable data about which American households are refusing telemarketing calls. This technological solution gives Americans power against telemarketing while maintaining privacy from government and business alike. When we seek privacy, we need to watch out for governments first. And when we seek freedom from intrusive marketers, the marketplace itself has a product that will shut them up. To get a little peace at feeding time, John J. Miller would give up a few tax dollars, some of the other guy's freedom, and a dash of privacy from government. Whether this would get him anything is an open question. He would probably do better to look for solutions in the private sector first, and accept offers from the government a little more grudgingly. — Jim Harper is editor of Privacilla.org, a web-based think tank that takes a free-market, pro-technology approach to privacy policy. |
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