Larry and Us

Benito Mussolini would probably have liked Larry Ellison. An ally of Adolf Hitler, Mussolini would have admired the American software mogul because Ellison’s database easily could have kept track of train schedules. But tracking trains is not the same as tracking people. Trains don’t have a right to privacy.

Ellison's database, Oracle, is the engine behind credit card companies, behind Amazon and Yahoo. Oracle tracks our purchases, our debits and credits, and from that it can infer where we were and what we do.

Does this bother you? It apparently doesn't bother Larry Ellison. In a recent New York Times magazine article, the reporter questioned him about Americans' potential loss of privacy.

"I don't really understand," replied the billionaire. "Central databases already exist. Privacy is already gone."

Maybe privacy is already gone for high-flyers like Ellison, a public figure in a prominent position. And maybe some measure of privacy has been lost by the rest of us, besieged by commercial offers that mirror our purchases. Perhaps Ellison enjoys the company of his own database double, a virtual salesman who anticipates his next purchase.

Though I doubt very much that Mr. Ellison has had much dealings with the darker side of our computer composite, our personalized, virtual cop. The cop that is embodied in the "system" which refuses to accept our charge cards, which bungles our loans, which shuts off services for no apparent reason.

It's unlikely that Ellison has had his credit card shut off because the TRW database, an Oracle database, has concluded that he is using his own credit card fraudulently. It's likely that Larry hasn't waited on a checkout line to be scolded by a clerk.

Larry Ellison, who has a personal jet that he flies himself, doesn't have to wait on line to board a plane. Do you think he is scanned and frisked like most of the rest of us? Do you think he'll be stopped at the gate because the Oracle database believes he's done something wrong in the past? Or when it tries to predict someone might do something wrong in the future?

Seers are notoriously vague and often wrong. Apparently Mr. Ellison hasn’t gotten word that his Oracle makes mistakes.

And yet Ellison is lobbying the Federal government to consider Oracle to integrate its current databases, to federalize the private cop that currently haunts us in our consumer lives. Except this cop will have men with handcuffs to do its bidding, even if it only has the brains of Miss Cleo.

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