(FORTUNE Magazine) – We began talking back to Privacy for Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone's Life an Open Secret somewhere around the sixth word of the subtitle and basically never stopped. The author, Business Week investigative reporter Jeffrey Rothfeder, is mining a rich vein of paranoia and laboring to make it richer. His basic proposition: Everybody's secrets are ending up in some electronic database or other, available for all the world to gape at. ''Technology has become uncontrollable, a rampaging flood, carving its own course.'' The world is full of ''information rapists.'' Shudderific, eh? The view in this corner is that most of what Jeff is complaining about is good for the people. It is desirable that folks offering credit have good information about borrowers. Also that sellers have good information about the income levels, bill-paying propensities, and consumption habits of prospective buyers. And we should presumably want the cost of this information to be as low as possible, since markets will translate high costs into less data. Yes, it is unfortunate that credit bureaus sometimes get their facts wrong, but nobody's perfect. It is too bad that some folks traffic illegally in proprietary information, creating databases that enable investigative reporters to pull off such stunts as gaining access to Dan Rather's credit rating. (Alas, it turns out to be excellent.) But the damage done by such invasions of privacy is probably not great. There is no way to estimate its magnitude, since Rothfeder's case depends almost entirely on scary anecdotes. The damage is almost certainly less than one would anticipate from the database regulation he seems to want. | Actually, it is not entirely clear what he does want. At some points, he is bemoaning the fact that sainted Senator Bill Proxmire, author of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, did not succeed in imposing still more restrictions on the sale of credit data, e.g., to landlords. But in other contexts, Rothfeder appears to acknowledge that abundant credit information is highly desirable. ''If lenders were unable to make educated credit decisions based on an accurate view of an individual's past credit performance, a dangerously large number of loans would slip into arrears.'' He does not deal with the fact that lenders' information costs are lowered by their ability to sell their information, e.g., to landlords. Anyhow, what about the problem of rent payments in arrears?