[krishicks]

> “He was, in my humble opinion, a technology genius, a computer math genius,” says Martha Walters Barnett, a former TLO chief privacy officer. “He was among the first to acknowledge … that insignificant, unrelated pieces of data, when put together in the right way, could become a powerful tool.”

Hmm.

David Burnham published The Rise of the Computer State (ISBN-10: 0394514378) in 1983. In the "Data Bases" chapter, he writes about how transactional data (when you swipe a credit card, when you pay a bill) that used to exist on paper only was then starting to be stored in databases by different companies which, with the rise of cheap and fast networking, could then be quickly and easily combined in previously unfeasible ways. He specifically calls out credit reporting agencies TRW and Equifax, and warns that "the astounding power of these records is not appreciated by the public, the courts or Congress."

It's a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it.

[gcb0]

his other publications https://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81100305105&coll=DL&dl...