News Regarding the Center
Presidential Phone Compromised? Ho Hum
New York Times
November 28, 2008
When Verizon employees gained unauthorized access to President-elect
Barack Obama's mobile phone records, you might think that every
cellphone owner got a queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach and
privacy advocates would go wild.
Instead, after an apology from Verizon, the issue died with a whimper.
Which raises the question: Why? Have we simply accepted the admonition
of Sun Microsystems's Chairman Scott McNealy, "There is no privacy. Get
used to it"?
Not necessarily, says James Katz, director of the Center For Mobile
Communication Studies at Rutgers University, who studies how people use
their phones.
The Obama phone invasion, he says, didn't raise public hackles for
several reasons.
First, "The relative violation is small," he says. The Verizon employees
were just looking at call records, not listening to calls.
Second, people are accustomed to having private records read under
certain conditions. "It's constantly the case that medical records are
investigated by medical employees, and tax forms are seen by tax
employees," he says. So phone guys looking at phone records is no big
deal. Plus, people aren't rattled by private information being seen by
strangers. "What my studies show," he says, "is people are concerned
about what their neighbors know, rather than faceless employees of a
large corporation."
Finally, people may see the Obama breach as understandable curiosity.
"People are just fascinated by famous and powerful figures, and they
will want to get as much information and be as close to these figures as
they can," he says. Ordinary citizens aren't threatened, thinking no one
wants to see their records.
Not that it won't cause some industry ripples, says Professor Katz.
"What I can guarantee, that Verizon is going to launch many internal
educational programs for their employees to make sure this will never
happen again."
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