|
|||||
|
Logistics company Excel has announced an RFID trial with the UK retailer House of Fraser. RFID tags will be “attached directly to garments providing the scope to track shipment movements at item level”. No comment is made as to whether the tags will be disabled and/or removed at point of sale. Press release available here. Cross-posted from the shiny new RFID Scanner February 18th, 2004 | Comments are closed
 Here is an interesting piece about the impact of the Data Protection Act on the world of higher education. As so often, the attempt to suppress badness results in the suppression of, if not goodness, then at least the entirely reasonable. February 9th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Government invasion of privacy – for example via Identity Cards – is high profile. Arguably a greater danger is when society itself ceases to respect privacy and believes it OK to breach it as a matter of course. I’ve recently learned via the Liberty discussion board and handbag.com about an organisation called Millenium AuPairs. I must stress that as far as I know this organisation is entirely reasonable and above board. Unfortunately their application form is not. See here: Millenum AuPairs registration form Now, the question about weight might be non-PC, but that’s not the issue. Scroll down and you see that they are asking prospective nannies if they have “ever been a victim of sexual, emotional or physical abuse?”. And “If you have answered yes to any of the above, please give details”. Details! This is outrageous. Why ask? Are they assuming that victims of abuse are more likely to be abusers? I don’t know. What I do know is that this question is an invasion of privacy. As chocalatedrop put it on handbag.com:
OK, this probably doesn’t affect you today. But imagine if this sort of intrusive question becomes accepted practice on any application form… February 4th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Silicon.com reports that the controversial radio frequency ID (RFID) tracking tags will become ubiquitous in consumer goods but privacy issues, standards and cost need to be addressed first, according to a senior executive of UK supermarket chain Safeway. Safeway ran an RFID pilot with Unilever last year on 40,000 cases of Lynx deodorant tracking them from the factory through to the shelves of three stores and, in an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Safeway CIO Ric Francis said that while the company has no immediate plans to use RFID, the pilot did enough to convince him that the technology is absolutely key to the future of the retail sector.
The hope is that once the standards are in place and the cost of the RFID chips drops, then the technology will become an unseen and accepted part of shopping. January 22nd, 2004 | Comments are closed
A kind reader provided a link to an article by the BBC warning that snooping powers given to more than 600 public bodies look set to create a small industry of private firms that will help process requests for information about who people call, the websites they visit and who they swap e-mail with. One firm, called Singlepoint, has been specifically created to act as a middleman between the bodies that want access to data and the net service providers and phone operators that hold it.
Singlepoint spokesman explained that without Singlepoint it would be more difficult and costly for public authorities to request data as they would have to set up relationships with all of the UK’s communication service providers. Instead, Singlepoint was setting up a system that would automatically route requests for information to relevant net or phone firms. The Home Office estimates that up to 500,000 requests per year are made for information about who pays for a particular phone or web account. About 90% of these requests are for subscriber information. Singlepoint estimates that there could be millions of requests per year. Most of these requests are made by the police but approximately 4% are made by the many public authorities that have had new powers granted under RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act). Other firms are starting to set themselves up as trainers for people within public bodies involved with investigations. the Home Office was keen to get firms offering courses because the police did not have the resources to take on the training of these public body workers itself. Bodies granted snooping powers include the Serious Fraud Office, all local authorities and councils plus other organisations such as the Charity Commission and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science. When proposals to grant these snooping powers were first aired in mid-2002 they were greeted with alarm by privacy advocates and civil liberty groups. A campaign co-ordinated by the FaxYourMP website prompted the government to withdraw its proposals. However, following a consultation exercise the proposals were resurrected and the powers granted in a series of statutory instruments issued in November 2003. January 21st, 2004 | Comments are closed
Wired reports that the companies and organizations behind radio-frequency identification tags are scrambling to improve their image by promising to protect the privacy rights of consumers, after they were caught trying to dig up dirt about one of their most effective critics. They also announced development of devices that disable RFID tags, which they are placing on everything from shampoo bottles to suit jackets in the United States and Europe. Privacy groups, led by Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (or CASPIAN), fear that businesses and governments can use those signals to track individuals’ movements inside stores and in public places. One organization may have been shamed into soliciting CASPIAN’s advice, however. The Grocery Manufacturers of America this week inadvertently sent an internal e-mail to CASPIAN suggesting it was looking for embarrassing information about the group’s founder, Katherine Albrecht. The e-mail, written by a college intern at GMA, reads:
Wal-Mart, which tested RFID tags and readers in at least two of its stores last year, said it would adhere to the RFID privacy guidelines published by EPCglobal, the EPC standards body. The guidelines require companies to publicly state how they plan to use data collected from the EPC tags. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark insists:
CASPIAN’s Albrecht said she welcomes tag-killing technologies, as well as the overtures by RFID users who want to work with her.
January 13th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The Toronto Star story is here. Oh dear. It seems that they have a privacy “czar” in those parts. I don’t think of czarism as being especially good for the rights of the citizenry, do you? Be careful you don’t ever get accused of violating it, no matter how sensibly or blamelessly. December 17th, 2003 | Comments are closed
USA Today reports that face-scanning technology designed to recognize registered sex offenders and missing children has been installed in a Phoenix school in a pilot project that some law enforcement and education officials hope to expand. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a tough-talking sheriff who has previously gained notoriety for his chain gangs and prison-issued pink underwear said:
Civil libertarians have raised red flags about the idea, pointing to potential privacy violations, and biometrics experts say facial recognition programs are not foolproof. December 16th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Wired has an article about the Supreme Court hearing on whether the federal government should reimburse individuals whose sensitive data was disclosed illegally, even if no harm can be proven. At issue before the court, according to privacy advocates, is how valuable privacy really is. The Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from disclosing private information intentionally, without the individual’s consent, and provides for a $1,000 minimum fine if the individual is “adversely affected.” Marcia Hoffman, staff counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, argues that Congress preset the penalty precisely because it is so hard to put a price on an abstract concept such as privacy or to prove damages in absence of others’ misuse of that data.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argues that if the government has to pay damages in the case of any improper release of someone’s Social Security number, then reporters will not get information from the government that they need and are entitled to.
And we would not want the government agencies nervous, would we…? December 8th, 2003 | Comments are closed
There’s a Reason online article here, and comments about it all on the Reason blog here, about this:
Says commenter James Merrit:
We have similar money laundering stuff here in Britain as well, as David Carr explains. And turning traders into government stooges has also been here a long time. If you buy a TV, the shop you buy it from has long wanted to know who you are so that it can tell the government and the government can check that you’ve got a TV license. If you refuse to say who you are, you are liable to end up not buying the TV, as Michael Yardley explains in the latest Spectator:
December 8th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Googling “privacy” took me to this piece about the problem of junk mail sent to dead people.
Yes it really isn’t that funny, especially as the failure to find good ways to stop junk mail (and junk email) will mean bad ways, i.e. ways that don’t stop the junk, but stop other things which are good, like, I don’t know, freedom of communication. December 2nd, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Wired reports that Congress delayed the planned takeoff of a controversial new airline passenger-profiling system until an independent study of its privacy implications and effectiveness at stopping terrorism can be completed. A congressional conference committee, which was reconciling the Senate and House versions of the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for next year, opted to keep the Senate’s stronger language that prohibits deployment of the Transportation Security Administration’s CAPPS II program until the General Accounting Office certifies to Congress that the system will not finger too many innocent passengers. The study will also check whether the system will effectively pinpoint terrorists, and whether an appeals system is in place for those delayed or prohibited from flying. CAPPS II is intended as a high-tech replacement for the current system, which simply checks passenger names against a list of suspected terrorists. The new system will require passengers to provide airlines with additional information, which the agency will check against commercial databases and a watch list of suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes. The system will then color-code each passenger, according to decisions made by the system’s pattern-matching algorithms. An ideologically diverse coalition of civil-liberty advocates oppose the project, saying the system would be Big Brotheresque and ineffective. This is far from won but at least it is a step in the right direction. Most likely the GAO study will be done, the boxes ticked and the next terrorist attack will result in yet another series of knee-jerk reactions from governments. But I would like to be proven wrong. November 25th, 2003 | Comments are closed
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||