Invasion Of The Data Snatchers

The Age

Wednesday June 20, 2001

GARRY BARKER

WITHIN hours of arriving, anonymously he thought, in his new home in Green Brook, New Jersey, and having his telephone connected, Dr Jason Catlett was besieged by telemarketing calls. He hadn't told any merchants he was there. The calls just started.

A day or so later, personally addressed catalogues began to fill his mailbox.

``Then the Welcome Waggon lady came around," he recalls. Welcome Waggons, a feature of US suburban life, greet new arrivals with gifts and offers from merchants looking for new customers. ``I didn't realise the Welcome Waggon lady was part of a mighty marketing machine," Catlett says.

That was 1992, when Catlett moved from Sydney to the United States to work at AT&T's research laboratories. The intrusions, and his expertise in data mining, the technology that collects and collates information from computer databases, led him to set up Junkbusters Inc, an IT consultancy that works on privacy issues for governments and corporations. Today Catlett is seen as the leading US expert on the interplay between technology, marketing and privacy.

Computers are constantly collecting and exchanging personal information about individuals, says Catlett, who is in Melbourne to speak at a seminar on privacy law next week. This is usually done without people's knowledge, but privacy is fast becoming a major global issue, he says.

Catlett thinks Victoria has good privacy laws - better than the Commonwealth provisions to come into force at the end of this year. But he says that neither they, nor US laws, match Europe's strict rules. What's more, Catlett says that if the European Union deems Australia's laws insufficiently strict, it may refuse to trade with Australia.

``Under European Union law, the flow of information to countries that do not adequately protect privacy is restricted," he says. ``The EU has already said, diplomatically, that Australian law is not sufficient. So privacy is now a trade issue as well as a human-rights issue."

History tells us, says Catlett, why strong privacy laws matter. ``When the Germans invaded the Netherlands they helped themselves to the meticulous genealogical records the Dutch Government had kept on its people. This identified the Jews and the mentally infirm and that information was fed into the Nazi program of concentration and extermination.

``That shows you that society should make a decision on how much personal data should be flying around about its citizenry."

In the US and elsewhere, identity theft from databases is a huge and thriving industry, Catlett says. Thieves ``get your details, pretend to be you, get a credit card and rack up horrendous bills".

Amazon.com, the massive Internet retailer, is one of many corporations building personal customer profiles.

``I have been battling for a year, trying to get them to delete the information they have on me. They refuse," Catlett says. ``With computer storage doubling every year, it's cheaper to keep data than to remove it."

E-mail is also a serious source of electronic intrusion. More than a quarter of all the billions of e-mail messages sent on the Internet every day are unwanted and intrusive ``spam", and much of it is fraudulent, Catlett says. Spammers are expert at compiling lists of e-mail victims. ``For example, if they come across an e-mail address such as fred77@hotmail.com, it's a fair bet there are other Freds at hotmail."

E-mail accounts for about 30 per cent of Internet traffic, Catlett observes. ``We are spending billions of dollars to support this toxic waste. The US outlawed junk faxes in 1991. Why they don't oulaw spam e-mail I can't understand."

Dr Catlett will speak at a two-day seminar on privacy law at Victoria University from June25.