IP: two on A big story, I think: "Single-Number Plan Raises Privacy Fears"

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>cc: lauren@pfir.org, neumann@pfir.org
>
>Dave,
>
>This is but another one of various "schemes" that claim all sorts of
>marvelous "service integrations" but actually are likely to make an already
>bad situation even worse.  There are already firms out there churning up the
>databases trying to link Internet users' e-mail addresses to "personally
>identifiable information" from other sources (retail sales, phone listings,
>voter registration data, etc.)  so as to have tidy personal dossiers that
>include name, physical address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and all
>sorts of other goodies.  Anything that makes the jobs of these information
>vampires any easier should be roundly discouraged, particularly when you
>just *know* they won't show up as fully "opt-in" and will end up being
>promoted to people who won't have the backgrounds to fully understand the
>ramifications of participating.
>
>Note that the U.S. Postal Service has been doing their own work along these
>lines, with plans to assign every physical address in the country its own
>e-mail address.  The negative ramifications of that I'll leave as an
>exercise for the reader for now.
>
>--Lauren--
>Lauren Weinstein
>lauren@pfir.org or lauren@vortex.com or lauren@privacyforum.org
>Co-Founder, PFIR: People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
>Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
>Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
>"Reality Reset" Columns - http://www.vortex.com/reality


From: Einar Stefferud <stef@nma.com>
Subject: Re: IP: A big story, I think: "Single-Number Plan Raises Privacy
Fears"

Pardon me, but this ENUM stuff appears to me to be a repeat of the whole 
mess that Marshall and I went through with the North American Directory 
Forum (NADF) back around 1990;-)...





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