Computers and privacy: What price analytic power?

Confidential data, pertaining to an identifiable individual or an identifiable small group of individuals, is extremely useful in social science research as well as in governmental administration and private business operations. It tends to be confidential because its full usefulness requires the ability to link the records of a particular decision unit together, despite disparate sources of the data. Both uses and abuses of such data are with us now, and the potential expansion of these requires more than technical “know how” to prevent errors and buggings if the expansion of uses is to be sufficiently greater than the expansion of abuses to justify any expansion at all. Legislation is needed and must control both uses and abuses (they tend to blend in any event). Among other things, such legislation should provide essential standards for file maintenance and disclosure, and provide that an individual be informed as to what identifiable data about him is on file, where it is, and why.