Slipstream: Personal Data Takes a Winding Path Into Marketers’ Hands

“What’s in it for you?” said the flier from MS LifeLines, a support network for patients and their families that is financed by two drug makers, Pfizer and EMD Serono. “Strategies for managing and understanding your symptoms. Information about available treatments for relapsing M.S.”

The thing is that my friend, who requested that I keep her name out of this column, does not have multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system.

But last year, she did search online for information about various diseases, including M.S., on a number of consumer health sites. She also subscribed to an online recommendation engine where she looked up consumer reviews of local physicians.

Now she wondered whether one of those companies had erroneously profiled her as an M.S. patient and shared that profile with drug-company marketers. She worried about the potential ramifications: Could she, for instance, someday be denied life insurance on the basis of that profile? She wanted to track down the source of the data, correct her profile and, if possible, prevent further dissemination of the information. But she didn’t know which company had collected and shared the data in the first place, so she didn’t know how to have her entry removed from the original marketing list.

In our data-happy society, the case of the mistaken M.S. patient illustrates a lack of visibility for people interested in how information about them changes hands. When consumers fill out warranty cards, enter sweepstakes, answer online surveys, agree to online privacy policies or sign up to receive e-mails from brands, they often don’t realize that certain details — linked to them by name or by customer ID code — may be passed along to other companies. That can make it hard for people seeking to correct errors to find the keepers of their marketing profiles.

I was ruminating on that problem in Washington on Wednesday, when I paid a visit to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, who has made consumer privacy one of his signature issues.

Americans, he says, should be allowed “to be left alone.”

In part, this belief stems from his own nature. He describes himself as an introvert, a person who would rather stay at home and listen to Bach fugues than attend Beltway shindigs. But mainly, he just thinks that privacy is a fundamental American right.

“The principles are remarkably simple,” Mr. Rockefeller said, comfortably installed in an armchair in his Senate office. Americans, he continued, should have the right to decide what kind of marketing material is sent to them and what other people know about them: “People have the right to be private insofar as it’s possible in the modern world.”

Earlier that day, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, of which Mr. Rockefeller is chairman, had convened a hearing on the status of an online privacy mechanism for consumers called Do Not Track. The idea behind it is that people should be able to turn on settings in their Internet browsers to signal advertisers, data brokers and other third-party operators not to collect information about their activities across the Web. Advertising networks and other entities would theoretically honor those don’t-track-me flags by restricting the amount of information they collected.

But years after the Federal Trade Commission recommended that advertisers adopt such a browser-based system, consumer advocates and ad industry groups still seem at odds over fundamental issues — including the very definition of Do Not Track. In an attempt to pressure the ad industry to get with the program, the Senate committee held a hearing.

“I want to get to the bottom of this controversy,” Mr. Rockefeller said in his opening statement. “I want the witnesses to publicly explain exactly what they believe has gone wrong, and what they are prepared to offer to make Do Not Track a reality for consumers.”

Yet he acknowledges that this kind of privacy option for online consumers, even if it eventually goes into effect, does not address a larger issue: the thousands of details that third-party data gatherers, who typically don’t interact directly with consumers, have already amassed about a majority of adults in the United States. For instance, there is no federal law that requires such companies to allow consumers to have access to and correct marketing data that’s been compiled about them. That is partly why the Senate committee opened an investigation last year into the practices of leading data brokers.

Mr. Rockefeller says the investigation is continuing.

So I decided — after asking permission from the friend who received the M.S. flier — to see if I could find out how erroneous information about her health status moved from one company to another. It wasn’t an obvious trajectory.

Erin-Marie Beals, a spokeswoman for EMD Serono, told me that MS LifeLines sends marketing materials only to people who have indicated an interest in multiple sclerosis and have provided their contact information either directly to MS LifeLines or through other programs, like online surveys or subscriptions. Ms. Beals pointed me to the firm that had provided my friend’s information — the KBM Group, a marketing company that specializes in consumer data and analytics.

Ultimately, Barbara Palmer, the senior vice president for marketing at the KBM Group, told me that her firm had obtained the information from a survey company whose online questionnaire my friend had filled out in 2010. That survey, Ms. Palmer said, asked general questions, including some about health interests. She said it also contained a specific disclosure: “By completing the health-related questions on the survey, you are consenting to the use of this information for direct marketing purposes.”

Ms. Palmer added that her company honored people’s requests to opt out of its file. The Direct Marketing Association also provides a program for consumers who want to opt out of receiving all kinds of pitches by mail.

At the end of the day, information about my friend ended up in the hands of at least two companies she had never heard of, let alone interacted with. Other companies may also have obtained the data.

The proliferation of intimate details about people’s health, financial or academic status — even when the data are correct — particularly troubles Senator Rockefeller. Although laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act limit the use of people’s credit and medical records, data brokers are often able to compile consumers’ financial and health information through other means.

“One of the things that really disturbs me in privacy, or the lack of it, is the way that data brokers can go in and buy all your health records, your financial records — they can get it one way or another,” Mr. Rockefeller said during the hearing. “What is of you, they can have.”

He added: “We are talking about a very, very large industry here which can decide to do that and which is doing that.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.

Personal Injury Lawyer Feels the Need for Speed

High-speed racing is "an adrenaline rush like no other," says Tom Schaefer, a personal injury lawyer in Suwanee, Ga. He says his clients who are motorcycle accident victims appreciate his expertise as a biker.

Four times a year, personal injury lawyer Tom Schaefer locks his office in Suwanee, Ga., loads his truck and heads north for a weekend that could not contrast more with a relaxing getaway in the Georgia mountains.

Schaefer, 47, races motorcycles -- at up to three times the legal speed on metro Atlanta highways. He has established 119 land-speed records in the various divisions for cycle classifications and engine size.

Schaefer's trips lead to a one-mile racing layout in Wilmington, Ohio, on a former World War II airstrip. One by one, riders test their skills and courage, and few have been as committed or accomplished as Schaefer, who raced four different bikes for a while.

He won four Motorcycle Points Championships in successive years with an organization called the East Coast Timing Association at another strip in Maxton, N.C., where he officially reached 206.391 mph.

Schaefer, a single man who estimates he has logged a quarter-million miles on motorcycles, is all too aware of the vehicle's dangers on two fronts. He serves as the attorney for casual riders involved in mishaps. And three racers whom he considered friends died in accidents while pursuing their passion.

You first hopped aboard a motorcycle at the age of 8. Was there a mini Hells Angels club?

My parents have a farm up in Missouri, where I grew up. We had a couple of horses. My dad was getting a little frustrated chasing them down on 160 acres of land so we could ride them. He asked if I wanted to ride a motorcycle. He said, "At least I won't have to go chase it down. It will be right where I left it." Oddly enough, my parents still have that motorcycle they got me, in the basement of their house.

What is the attraction of riding motorcycles at high speed?

I do it because I love it. It's exciting, an adrenaline rush like no other.

You are not just competing against people that day, but against people in history. Your records are there until somebody else is faster.

What was your most frightening experience?

It was my final run in Maxton that got me in the 200-mph club. I was blown off my line by a crosswind just before the one-mile marker. I couldn't get the bike turned for the dogleg to go into the long shutdown area. I wouldn't say I was in a panic, but I was extremely concerned about what was going to happen. I drove the motorcycle to the [outside] of the cones onto a rough, bumpy patch. Once I got to that area, I was able to slow the bike down. I remember looking down, and I could see just past my left leg into the open field a foot away.

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Judge's Career Inspired by Personal Experience With Ted Bundy Case

By Carlos Harrison All Articles 

Daily Business Review

December 21, 2012

Palm Beach County, Fla., Court Judge Laura Johnson was in college the night a serial killer attacked. It changed her life, and her career path.

Johnson was the last person known to have entered the Tri Delta sorority house in Tallahassee on the night in 1978 when Ted Bundy slipped into the nearby Chi Omega house to kill two female Florida State University students.

She knew both victims.

"I was identified as the last person to come into my sorority house," she said. "I was woken up by the police and interviewed by the police that morning."

She was a sophomore finance major.

"I didn't have any intention of going to law school," she said. But the murders "changed our way of life at FSU. ... I followed that case, day by day by day by day. I lived through the horror of it, and I just became interested in the whole process and the whole way it played out."

Even then, though, she "anticipated more of a career on the non-litigation side."

Right out of law school, she landed a job doing criminal appeals in the attorney general's office. Four months later she was recruited to do the same thing at the Palm Beach state attorney's office. "And I was hooked."

She stayed as a prosecutor for 19 years.

'TRADITIONAL ROUTE'

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Judge's Career Inspired by Personal Experience With Ted Bundy Case

By Carlos Harrison All Articles 

Daily Business Review

December 21, 2012

Palm Beach County, Fla., Court Judge Laura Johnson was in college the night a serial killer attacked. It changed her life, and her career path.

Johnson was the last person known to have entered the Tri Delta sorority house in Tallahassee on the night in 1978 when Ted Bundy slipped into the nearby Chi Omega house to kill two female Florida State University students.

She knew both victims.

"I was identified as the last person to come into my sorority house," she said. "I was woken up by the police and interviewed by the police that morning."

She was a sophomore finance major.

"I didn't have any intention of going to law school," she said. But the murders "changed our way of life at FSU. ... I followed that case, day by day by day by day. I lived through the horror of it, and I just became interested in the whole process and the whole way it played out."

Even then, though, she "anticipated more of a career on the non-litigation side."

Right out of law school, she landed a job doing criminal appeals in the attorney general's office. Four months later she was recruited to do the same thing at the Palm Beach state attorney's office. "And I was hooked."

She stayed as a prosecutor for 19 years.

'TRADITIONAL ROUTE'

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Law Technology News: Is It Time to Wave Goodbye to the Personal Computer?

Is the personal computer dead? The usefulness of Apple's iPads and other mobile devices has been heavily debated in legal organizations; the "consumerization" of IT has been extensively discussed.

Bits Blog: Seeking a Magic Tool for Personal Productivity

Yuri Kochetkov/European Pressphoto Agency Charles Simonyi preparing for a ride in the Soyuz spacecraft in 2009.

If big names and bold ambitions predicted success, then the new partnership between David Allen, the personal productivity guru and author of “Getting Things Done,” and Intentional Software would surely be a winner. The goal: to help organize a person’s digital life

Intentional Software was founded a decade ago by Charles Simonyi, a software wizard and an early hire at Microsoft, who oversaw the design of its Office productivity applications. Recently, Mr. Simonyi is probably best known as a billionaire space tourist, having twice taken rides on the Soyuz spacecraft.

Yet Mr. Simonyi’s greatest achievements are in computing. His pedigree goes back before Microsoft. In the 1970s, Mr. Simonyi, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was a member of the group at Xerox PARC that largely invented modern personal computing. He wrote a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen as it would appear when printed on a page — a breakthrough technique at the time, called WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get. Bravo would become Microsoft Word.

The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., sprang from Mr. Simonyi’s research at Microsoft on “intentional programming,” clever software that better understands what a user wants to do, his or her intentions. That goal has been around since the beginning of software. Fortran, the first successful, higher-level programming language, was designed to let engineers and scientists write programs in a vernacular that closely resembled math formulas familiar to them. Fortran is an abbreviation for FORmula TRANslator.

But intentional programming, in its ultimate vision, would be a big step above programming languages — essentially allowing people to tell machines what computing tasks they want done. If this sounds like science fiction to you, you have plenty of company among the skeptics.

Whether Intentional Software is an intriguing research venture or a real company is an unanswered question. Its work has attracted a couple of contracts from Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, and some private-sector projects.

Eric Anderson, a software engineer, entrepreneur and chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism pioneer, was recruited to Intentional Software less than two years ago. His mission is to find wider markets for the company’s technology.

Mr. Anderson, a devotee of the Getting Things Done regimen, got in touch with Mr. Allen and explained the potential of Intentional Software’s technology as a “meta-tool” to help organize a person’s digital life.

Mr. Allen was intrigued and both sides eventually agreed to pursue the opportunity, with a partnership announced on Tuesday. Mr. Allen describes the company’s software as “a solution looking for the right problem.”

The partnership, Mr. Anderson said, will design software that sits on top of a person’s digital calendar and communications, including e-mail, text messages, Facebook and Twitter feeds. Then, the software will automatically apply the G.T.D. principles of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reviewing and prioritizing the various channels of information in a person’s life.

“This could be as transformative to the way people work as Microsoft Office has been,” Mr. Anderson said.

Every person, though, would be able to tailor the behavior of the software to individual priorities, like work chores filtered by what is immediate and what is important.

Flexibility, Mr. Allen says, is crucial to avoid the pitfall of most software, which he refers to as “Naziware.” What is needed, he said, is “an orientation tool.”

“Right now, the computer is not an orientation tool — it’s a disorientation tool,” he said.

The partnership plans to crowdsource the design of the new productivity software. It is hoping to tap ideas from the many Getting Things Done fans about what they want to see in a superproductivity product and be beta testers for experimental versions of the software. And Intentional Software has set up a Web site for interested individuals and corporations, www.intentsoft.com/gtd.

A timetable for shipping a product? Too soon to say precisely, Mr. Anderson said, though probably a year or so. “This isn’t going to be years and years,” he said.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 16, 2012

A previous version of this post said that the partnership between Intentional Software and David Allen was announced on Wednesday, not on Tuesday.