Privacy advocate a San Diego original

By: EDMOND JACOBY - Staff Writer | Saturday, October 23, 2004 12:27 AM PDT ∞

Identity theft and the compromise of private information are hot topics today. But a dozen years ago, when Beth Givens first launched the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, they were little-understood problems.

Since then, Givens has become one of the few nationally recognized experts on the subject, and the clearinghouse a leading advocate for the creation of policies that protect the interests of individual consumers.

"I can't think of too many public issues that are more important than privacy," said Robert Felmuth of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego.

"Beth represents, in a sense, the ultimate diffuse interest," he said.

According to Felmuth, who taught Givens how to be an advocate, the businesses and government agencies that collect and swap information about people will always overlook privacy interests for the sake of efficiency and expediency. He calls them the profit stakeholders, and says that they only talk and listen to each other.

"It's thanks to Beth Givens that privacy is represented at the same bargaining table with those profit stakeholders," he said.

Givens explained that the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse began as a consumer education project, mailing privacy fact sheets to a slow-growing list of consumers. In 1996, it launched a Web page and overnight became a national organization.

"We were the first organization to work with identity theft, and we focused on credit reports, medical records, government records and wireless telephone issues," Givens said.

"To this day, we're the only privacy group that interacts directly with the public," she said.

Givens, a former librarian from Montana, is less interested in constitutional privacy ---- the right to be let alone ---- than in informational privacy ---- the right of an individual to control what happens to information about him or her.

"Personal information is a very profitable item," says Givens, who goes so far as to sign up for grocery store loyalty cards under names such as "Grocery Shopper" just to keep her personal information out of the hands of a company that wants to make a profit from it.

"Most modern countries have overarching privacy and data laws," Givens said. "Not the U.S. Here, we take privacy issues sector by sector," and businesses lobby heavily to defeat laws that would limit their freedom to collect, sell or buy personal information about consumers.

"Also, we have more of a dynamic, free-wheeling credit economy and business environment than many other countries do," she said, and while that gives consumers opportunities they might not otherwise have, it also exposes them to abuses.

"We work in the California Legislature to promote legislation that will give the individual more control over personal information," she said. "California has become a trend-setting state in that area."

According to Jamie Court, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, Givens' work in the Legislature has made her "the leading light on privacy in the nation.

"I think the reason California has the strongest financial privacy laws in the nation is Beth Givens," he said.

"Someone can sit in the Ukraine and steal the identity of someone in Sheboygan," Felmuth said.

"There are all sorts of things that person can do beyond just charging purchases to your credit card: He can borrow against your real estate, collect on your insurance," he warned.

That is because the United States is "at the bottom of the heap in the developed world when it comes to privacy laws," Givens said.

"We don't have really good, all-encompassing privacy laws like those in Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia and even Latin America," she said.

That is why there needs to be a Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, she said, and that thought gets her out of bed and drives her to work every day.

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675 or ejacoby@nctimes.com.

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