No Privacy for the Poor, Homeless

BERKELEY, California -- Activists and computer industry folks at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference are paying $140 a night to stay at a swanky hotel in Berkeley.

But they started the conference hearing about a group not usually talked about in these circles -- the homeless. A panel examined how massive databases and computer algorithms are being used to track the homeless or discriminate against the poor who need insurance.

Birny Birnbaum of the Center for Economic Justice tried to persuade the audience that insurance companies use credit report data and data-mining algorithms to single out the poor for higher insurance rates.

Birnbaum called the practice 21st-century redlining, referring to a now-outlawed banking practice that discriminated against minorities by refusing to issue mortgages to people buying homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But the panel spent most of its time talking about a new homeless database system mandated by the federal government.

Across the country, homeless shelters and other service providers are scrambling to implement an electronic homeless-management system by an October 2004 deadline set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Those systems, according to HUD draft standards, will include information on homeless individuals' incomes, mental health histories, dates of birth and Social Security numbers. The databases would keep the information for seven years.

The impetus for the homeless-management system came from Congress, which told HUD to come up with a better way to count the number of homeless people.

Cindy Southworth, technology director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told conference goers that the mandated databases would endanger the lives of women fleeing a violent partner. She argued that there are simpler, cheaper and less-invasive ways to achieve the goal of a homeless census.

"What has ended up happening has been the development of massive database systems, county by county, state by state, that are putting together systems almost as invasive as sex-offender registries for domestic violence victims and other homeless folks who are using services," Southworth said.

"It is a fabulous tool for stalkers," she said. "We are taking the exact location and other information about a victim and sticking it in a central server that's not very secure."

Alameda County, which includes the city of Berkeley and has an average of 6,215 homeless people a week, has been wrestling with this dilemma for months.

Service providers hope the centralized information will supply useful information on a client's background. Meanwhile, clients are tired of filling out the same paper intake form multiple times, according to Megan Schatz, coordinator for Alameda County's Continuum of Care Council.

Schatz says the county has bought licenses for the ServicePoint system, which has layers of "locks" to keep sensitive information from being shared among and even within agencies.

"We are 100 percent committed to protecting the privacy of survivors of domestic violence," Schatz said.

But Southworth said many counties aren't as careful and are already demanding that shelters turn over detailed information on domestic violence victims to make funding sources happy.

Just across the bay from the conference, San Francisco shelters are using a centralized system that tracks homeless people using a digital fingerprint and photo.

Chance Martin, of the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, told the conference that the system was not helping the homeless get better care.

"The biggest feature of the database is billing and inventory control," Martin said.

The system also plays into the fears of mentally ill patients, military veterans and immigrants with "cloudy legal status," who fear, fairly or not, they are being spied upon by the government, according to Martin.

Southworth suggested several alternatives to massive centralized databases, including issuing smartcards to homeless people, or simply standardizing the day homeless shelters conduct bed counts to get an accurate estimate of the number of homeless people.