Are privacy interests affected if the distribution of non-public data bankruptcy information is for profit?
Yes. As soon as profits become involved, consumers will surely see a loss of privacy with regard to their financial records. As discussed previously in Section 1.6, personal information is quite valuable to marketers. Personal information is often used to create profiles of individuals and the more information that is added to an individual’s profile (see Section 5.1 and 5.2 for details), the more that individual is pigeon-holed into a particular demographic – rightly or wrongly. Bankruptcy information will be one more data-point. Compounding the problem is that data collectors often view consumer data as their own — and treat it accordingly. Access to information in profiles then becomes an issue. For example, during the discussions at the Federal Trade Commission’s Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security, many of the marketers present felt that it was proper to limit access to consumer information by consumers. In fact, the most restrictive view of the panel would only allo
