Not to Be Indelicate, but …

Jim Harper, director of information-policy studies at the CATO Institute, says most privacy advocates are incensed by “private, for-profit use of data” and fall mute on what charitable groups do with all the personal information they collect on donors and prospects.

“Nonprofits want to appear on the good side of the privacy issue, but like any other organizational user of data, like the big financial institutions, they need a lot of data and need to do a lot of things with that data,” says Harper, who also serves as editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based think tank devoted exclusively to privacy issues. “Limiting the use of personal information is probably not beneficial.”