Oh dear, Google is in trouble…. they have been -surprise, surprise- criticized by privacy commissioners around the world on their privacy, or lack of privacy practices 😉
Read more at The New York Times. btw. I need to thank Jack for his tweet on this 🙂
Things are really getting hot in India. They are launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database. This is all part of the plan to ID every person in the national id scheme. Read more at BBC News.
Picked up from Jack’s tweets….
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
This is scandel.. read more at boingboing.
Despite misleading Ministerial claims in the UK that ID cards will be “voluntary”, these plans are still going ahead. In fact if you are a UK resident and need to apply for a passport in the next 10 years you will in any case end up in the ID database. Read more a no2id.
An excellent article on the use of CCTV, biometrics, databases, etc., in schools in the UK.
Can you imagine that on the uncertainly of whether CCTV should be permissible in toilets, Sayner (managing director of Proxis, a security installation company) reasons that “it depends exactly on what it is looking at,” adding that “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why should you object to that?” I just love this “nothing to hide” argument. For myself I’m not too keen on being the star on some camera footage when I visit the ladies room!
A portable GPS device that can be inserted into a backpack and used to monitor a child’s whereabouts is being tested in Canada, Wired reports. In being a new parent to a beautiful daughter myself in 2009, I understand why tracking your childrens’ movements is so compelling for parents.
However imagine how you felt the first time you went out by yourself as a child. The first time you were allowed to go to the local store and buy your favourite comic… imagine if you knew that your parents were always watching you. How would that have changed you as a person, the independence, the sense of adventure that you can only get when you do something yourself without thinking that you are always being watched. So the question is ‘what are you depriving your children of when you continuously monitor their movements’?
As Loopt and Google are moving forward in the realm of geosocial or mobile social networking, companies such as NearbyNow and Placecast are exploring ways that advertisers could potentially exploit growing databases of location-specific information (imagine, for instance, getting a coupon for pizza on your mobile phone after walking by a pizzeria). Read more..