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Law & Technology
Law and TechnologyNews Sites Becoming More Intrusive
By Deborah Pierce
Jul 18, 2002 -- The current trend of news sites requires people to register before allowing them to read content. This raises serious privacy and First Amendment issues for all of us as our newspaper reading habits become closely watched. Privacy policies offer some guidance about uses and disclosures of data but the main problem is in the gathering of the information in the first place.What's Collected and What's Disclosed
Let's look at the Web sites of three papers: the Seattle Times, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
The Seattle Times allows anybody to access stories on its site without providing any information.
The New York Times requires you to fill out a form before you can access stories. The forms ask about gender, household income (range), job title, job function, industry in which you work, and year of birth. The company does have a very clear privacy policy, which states "personal information about you as an individual subscriber will not be provided to any third party without your consent, except under the circumstances described in Compliance with Legal Process below." Aggregate data is shared with advertisers.
The LA Times goes even further. Required fields in the form include name, physical address, year of birth, gender, phone number, email address, and annual household income (range).
Not only is this an outrageous amount of information to require, but the LA Times makes it difficult to tell exactly what your rights are. The privacy policy is stealthily written in legalese. Consider this sentence from a section on cookies in the privacy policy: "As we adopt additional technology, we may also gather information through other means. In certain cases, you can choose not to provide us with information." Does that mean the company uses "Web beacons," or that it plans on merging offline and online data together? I'm not sure.
| For more information |
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LA Times registration page: www.latimes.com/services/site/registration/view.reg?temp=rc-registration New York Times registration page: No URL available Getting to Know You: www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1025227718.php Slashdot Discussion (has some tech self-help solutions): slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/30/0259218&mode=thread&tid=149 |
A lot of people register at news sites with fake names, and single purpose email addresses at Yahoo or Hotmail. This seems like a reasonable way to protect your anonymity, but is getting more difficult nowadays. The LA Times wants so much personal information, using a fake email address isn't going to help much. You'll need to fake your address, birth date, and phone number too.
A couple of issues ago I discussed a researcher who, armed with a zip code and a year of birth and using public records, was able to uniquely identify 80 percent of Cambridge, Massachusetts residents. If a company wanted to, it could use this registration information in conjunction with public records to identify visitors to the site.
Privacy and First Amendment Issues
The privacy issue associated with news sites gathering information about you is probably pretty obvious. When you give out your e-mail address, expect spam. If you give out your phone number, expect a telemarketer to give you a call at dinnertime.
The First Amendment issue doesn't lie with the news site, but instead with who will have access to the combination of registration information and your surfing history once it is gathered. Librarians have been put on notice that law enforcement wants access to check out lists of patrons who use the library; it's logical enough to believe that lists of people who read articles on particular topics might be equally interesting.
It's not just law enforcement that has access. Being a participant in a civil case can also bring your reading habits to light. Spouse divorcing you? That item you just read about romantic getaways might become highly relevant to opposing counsel.
Being able to read a wide variety of news, books, and other materials without someone watching what we read allows us to form ideas and viewpoints. Without that ability, people tend to self-censor, particularly if the viewpoint is an unpopular one. Self-censoring may become more acute once consequences of reading particular stories begin to rack up.
What You Can Do
* Email news sites and let them know that you object to their intrusive forms.
* Read news from sources that don't require registration and let them know you appreciate that they don't require registration.
* As usual, read privacy policies before you register.
* Read the Seattle Press' Privacy Policy
Reader Comments
Discuss this article in the forums!
| Chris Barker | Jul 23, 2002 | Auburn WA | System Engineer |
| You've GOT to be kidding. The whole premise of this article is totally, absurdly false. The First Amendment's Freedom of the Press is granted specifically to the owner of the press. It lets him publish without prior federal government restraint. There is no freedom to read the press. We have zero right to view the contents of any newspaper without permission from the owner of the newspaper. With a paper newspaper we purchase that right with money. If the Seattle Times wants to publish on a website they can set up pretty much whatever rules they want. So they are intrusive? Excuse me? Who logged into whose website? Who wanted to poke around in the Seattle Times’ information, read the comics, check the tv listings, catch up on a little news? Who wanted to intrude, grab and run without paying anything toward the expense of all the hardware, floor space and people needed to maintain the website? Who is giving instructions on how to steal from the newspapers by lying? Who thinks the Seattle Times owes all this, gratis, just because it’s on the internet? Grow up, already. If you don’t like the rules, go pay a quarter for a paper newspaper. | |||
| BDL | Jul 23, 2002 | Seattle | Proofreader |
| I thoroughly agree with you, Chris. | |||
| John Doe | Jul 26, 2002 | Anytown, USA | Misanthrope |
| Despite the myriad "abuses" thrust upon us by the media, I'm afraid I too agree with the engineer and the proofreader. The Web has been around long enough to have ruined the Net with commercialism, privacy invasion, etc. for anyone to still play "innocent victim." User a more secure browser/email client. User filters. Enter fake info. Complain to or walk away from a site that stops you at the door for not offering up something you don't wish to (or using an "other leading brand" browser). They have a right to ask; you have a right to decide if it's worth it or refuse to do business. | |||
| peter | Jan 22, 2003 | abidjan | banking |
| i love the site. | |||
| Larisa Rus | Apr 24, 2003 | Kirkland | student at kaminakin jr high |
| Hi my name is larisa and out 7th grade languge arts class has been working on a project called All in School. What we have done is raise money to help kids in Ghana, Africa go to school. We have raised enough money to send 27 kids to school. If you think thtas pretty cool for 7th grades to do that your gonna be suprised.When one of the students here worte to starbuck they send us back an email saing they wana help but did know how. I should tell you we were also wanting to get a small library to the district so they call have a book to read becasue we learned that they learn to read from papers. So when starbucks heard about that they told us they run a special program that collects books for less fourtinet people then us. we were very extited when we heard they were gonna help so now we are sendign over 4.000 books to temma ghana for them to make a library. i dotn want to bore you so if you would liek to hear more about this feel free to email me. thanx for all your help LArisa | |||
