The stuff your doctor used to write down on a file card now goes into the doctor's computer, and is probably shared with your HMO. The same sort of thing is happening with your school and employment records, and thanks to supermarket discount cards and bar-code scanners, some computer somewhere probably knows what you had for dinner last night. And it's probably not too hard for some other computer to mine that information.

Robert Gellman, a privacy and information policy consultant in Washington, D.C., summed up the problem with the provocative title of his recent article in the Washington Spectator : "How's Your Health? Just Ask the FBI" Gellman will visit Cornell University this week to offer further analysis in a free public lecture titled "Do We Have Any Privacy? Do We Even Know What It Is?" at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, in Uris Hall Auditorium on the Cornell campus.

The lecture is the second in a new series on IT (information technology) policy issues sponsored by the Cornell Computer Policy and Law program.

Gellman specializes in health confidentiality policy, privacy and data protection, and Internet privacy. A graduate of Yale Law School, he served for 17 years as chief counsel to the Subcommittee on Government Information in the House of Representatives. His responsibilities on the subcommittee included privacy, freedom of information and health-record privacy issues. He later served as a member of the Department of Health and Human Service's National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, 1996-200.