Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 10, Reply A, by Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!opnmail3.corp.hp.com!PODOLSKY_JOE/HP0000_02
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 94 07:07:00 -0800
There are really two issues here. One is the usage patterns that Bill is talking about, both with the library system and credit cards, banks, etc. That issue is part of a much larger privacy ethic that Bill touches on. The other issue is more mundane but operationally significant: how do we track, analyze, and improve data quality. One of the people who got this jotting told me that they have gone done special analyses of certain key company files and found that 90 % of them contain at least one significant error. I'm not smart enough to deal with the privacy issue. It gets into the "rights of the many versus the rights of the individual" debate, and I'm a staunch "individual" advocate. But, I do use my credit card in spite of knowing how the data is used because I prefer the convenience over the potential threat of misuse of the data. Of course, I haven't had Bill's horrible experiences. But, I think that we don't do enough to get the quality of our data to where it should be. Data has the full range of FURPS problems, and we waste a lot of resources on data rework. Working on those problems is a worthy and less controversial task. Joe