Computers today are part of our lives in ways we often do not even notice, not only in the more obvious personal computers we use at home and the larger computers we may use in such places as banks and libraries, but also in computer technology that is found in home appliances such as television sets, coffee makers, microwave ovens, videocassette recorders, and hand calculators, not to mention toys and games. The arrival of the computer age was so rapid that we have not yet managed to cope with all the changes or with many of the consequences. More and more people are concerned about the issue of privacy in an age in which virtually everything we do is recorded somewhere in a computer system. The potential for abuse is great. Congress has considered the issue, the courts have had to deal with it many times and will certainly have to address it in many cases in the future, and the public at large is convinced that there is a potential for abuse even if such abuse has not yet surfaced. Because of this concern, there is a need for a comprehensive program of legislation to identify the problem, clarify the issues, and offer a legal framework as a solution.
Data surveillance through the computer has created a system that increasingly menaces individual privacy. Computers had been employed first to store scientific and numerical information, or information that was already in the public domain but that had to be collected into one computerized source. However, computers were more and more being employed to collect sensitive information about the individual's personal life so that the individual was slowly losing control over his or her personal information. This problem of the danger of invasion of privacy has been foreseen for some time. The keeping of records is hardly a new activity, but computers have changed record-keeping activities in several ways: 1) they have made possible a new scale of information gathering; 2) they ha...