Posted on 02/16/2009 10:40:34 AM PST by thecodont
THERE are plenty of people who can muster outrage at Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman who is the latest example of win-at-any-cost athletes. But I’d prefer to see him as at the cutting edge of another scourge — the growing encroachment on privacy.
The way Mr. Rodriguez’s positive steroid test result became public followed a path increasingly common in the computer age: third-party data collection. We are typically told that personal information is anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and potentially life-changing.
In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed. Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the samples were then to be destroyed.
It is odd that most of the news coverage described the tests as “anonymous.” If the tests were truly anonymous, of course, Mr. Rodriguez would still be thought of as a clean player — as he long had insisted he was. But when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous” samples suddenly had clear labels on them.
As a friend put it in an e-mail message: “Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.”
(Excerpt) Read more at heraldtribune.com ...
If you were doing something illegal and somebody asked you to admit it “annonymously” within the confines of everybody who worked at your company, only...would you do it?
It seems to me if you were publicly telling people you were clean and your company or union asked you to tell them “annonymously” what you were really up to, it’d be dumb to tell the company or union the truth.
You should come from the perspective that nothing is truly annonymous (including Free Republic), so proceed valuing the risks and deciding to go forward, anyhow. As for privacy, breaking the law is breaking the law. Had it been murder, we would not be seeing this article. Since it’s steroids, it’s supposed to be his business only? That’s a slippery slope that sounds like the old argument regarding president Clinton. After all, it was just about sex wasn’t it? It was his and Monica’s business.
True privacy is first not doing things that you’d be embarrassed about if it were printed on the front page of the New York Times and if you do, keep it 100% to yourself.
Lesson learned.
Keep an eye on who collects your data: I am addressing law-abiding citizens.
Couldn’t the “privacy” interpretation of the constitution in Roe v Wade be used to strike down the medical information collection part of the Porkulus bill?
If privacy between patient and doctor applies to abortion, why not all other procedures?
If privacy between patient and doctor applies to abortion, why not all other procedures?
Good point. This sounds like it will (or should) eventually end up before SCOTUS.
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