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T A B L E__T A L K Discuss your favorite urban myths and hoaxes that have spread online in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Baring your soul to the Web By Simon Firth Online diarists have invented a new art form and gathered a devoted following. But now some pioneers are questioning what they've created (07/03/98) The big chilly By Julie Caniglia Down with air conditioning! (07/02/98) Razorfish among the sharks By Greg Lindsay In the rapidly consolidating world of Web design companies, is bigger really better? (07/02/98) America Online vs. the "Net nobility" By Andrew Leonard A new AOL chronicle paints the company's rise as the triumph of the online common man (07/01/98) Going once, going twice and growing like crazy By Janelle Brown Everything under the sun is on sale in eBay's online auctions (06/30/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

BY KARLIN LILLINGTON | So far this year, I have received a grand total of perhaps seven pieces of what might be construed as junk mail. I have never received a badgering phone call at dinner time, demanding that I consider the delights of aluminum siding, sets of encyclopedias or an alternative credit card to the one I possess. How did I get so lucky? Simple: I'm a European resident. Marketers can only acquire my personal information in carefully defined and controlled ways. If I return a product registration card, I know that the personal information I offer cannot be sold to others as part of a sales database unless my permission has been obtained. I am never asked, except by the government department that issued it, to identify myself by a nationally assigned number. And any organization that holds any information about me -- banks, medical offices, telephone companies, the supermarket whose loyalty program I belong to, my gym, the video rental shop or the place where I returned a product registration card -- must, at my request, supply me with full details of its computer records bearing my name. These are my rights, legally guaranteed to me as a resident of the European Union. Those rights, which are due to be further solidified in a pending European Data Directive on October 25, are based on "a philosophical view that privacy is a fundamental human right," according to Fergus Glavey, the Data Protection Commissioner for Ireland. (Each European country appoints its own data watchdogs charged with protecting its citizens' privacy rights.) In the meantime, tension is increasing daily in Washington over online data privacy, following a flurry of condemning reports pointing up the laxness of basic privacy protections in the U.S. As government-supported advocates of corporate self-regulation square off against those who say privacy legislation is a must, Europeans are watching the battle with some bemusement. N E X T_P A G E .|. U.S. pushes self-regulation; Europeans cry, "No privacy -- no trade!"