New Secret Codes Can Prevent a Computerized Big Brother

Abstract

As the use of computers becomes more pervasive, they are capturing increasingly more revealing data about our habits, lifestyles, values, whereabouts, associations, political and religious orientation, etc. The current approach, which requires individuals to identify themselves in relationships with organizations, allows records of all an individual’s relationships to be linked and collected together into a dossier or personal profile. Even though such profiles are too extensive to evaluate manually on a mass basis, automated evaluation is becoming increasingly feasible.