More CCTV to come for Sweden

The Swedish Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, announced this Monday that she was positive to changing the legislation regarding CCTV in public areas. Unfortunately, she wants to make it easier to set up cameras. Also, she proposes that store owners should not need to get permission beforehand. Instead, it should be enough to notify some time after the camera has been installed.

In brief, she is for making it easier for business owners and municipalities to install CCTV. She also want’s the governing of CCVT to be handled by the The Swedish Data Inspection Board (it was previously handled by the different county administrations). So one bad and one good then. But this statement made by Beatrice is a bit worrying:

“- It is about specific, defined areas where camera surveillance is very important as a preventive measure especially in the case of theft and burglary”. Sounds good, but this statement is not backed up by any proof. I’ve mentioned this in a previous post.

Even more worrying is that the opposing parties only object to that it has taken her so long to propose this change. One can only hope that this is all to get voters for the upcoming election this September.

UK national ID card scheme to be scrapped!

Wow, I love this news that UK’scoalition government will be keeping their promises to “reverse and restrain many of the surveillance systems that have marked its citizens out as the most watched in the world,” THINQ.co.uk reports. Plans include scrapping the National Identity Register and ID card, as well as biometric passports, and expanding the Freedom of Information Act. Other coalition commitments include removing innocent people’s records from the DNA database, regulating the use of CCTV and halting the prior government’s plan to retain national records of e-mail and communications data.

This will include a proposal to “outlaw” the finger-printing of children at school “without parental permission”. It will be interesting to see how they pan out in the statistics department for Privacy International “Most surveyed countries report” in a couple of years 🙂

One month today since Ivy joined us!

You know today is a pretty special day. It is exactly one month since my daughter Ivy checked-out and joined us, pappa and myself in this exciting world. Exciting because it feels today as though we have come over a challenging and most beautiful month and feel a real achievement. We are learning how Ivy likes things and Ivy is getting quite at home with the way we run things.

Other things linked to privacy have been interesting since Ivy’s birth.

1. I have during the pregnancy and afterwards needed to provide blood tests on many occasions and each time need to remember to ‘opt-out’ of them holding my blood in a blood bank somewhere. I am sure I forgot to do the opt-out once, and I need to check this. This was quite annoying.

2. In my book Virtual Shadows I said that all new-borns in Sweden provide a ‘blood-spot’ that is used in research for PKU. My experience now shows that this is the case although what I didn’t know before is that you can opt-out. This is what we did with Ivy.

3. Ivy got a personal ID number assigned which arosed a conflict of emotions both as a parent and privacy avocate. As a parent a sense of pride that my Ivy really existed as a Swedish citizen in the system, as a privacy avocate.. well no explanation needed there.

4. We bought a ‘child-alarm’ as we live in a big house and we could chose between audio or audio/video. I am dismayed that I chose the latter option. My need for Ivy’s safety in the case of Ivy seems to have overriden her need for privacy. Having said that the video stores nothing, and in practice I think it was a waste of money, we normally hear her crying before the video switches itself on anyhow triggered by the noise. I still think an audio version is a good choice. The video just gives a false sense of security.

5. Sweden has centralised their health records a little like what the U.K. has been trying to do against massive public resistance. I am in principle against this, but it does have its benefits so long as you trust the data holding authorities. The benefits became apparent when access to my medical records were needed urgently when I became very ill (that led to an early arrival for my daughter :-)). Again I am faced with the conflict of my safety vs. the right for privacy, and the need to trust those holding my private information. I have no choice but to trust the Swedish authorities, but I am not sure I would trust the British authorities centralisation efforts. Here we are looking at consolidation of 64m (living) health records not just 9 million as in Sweden. Even if you did trust the British authorities to have the right intentions, in practice if the business processes are not working today, how can technologies applied to flawed business processes be expected to protect the confidentality and integrity of your personal data?

Great firewall of China filled with ‘twittering’ holes ;-)

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen killings, social networking sites such as Twitter and the photo-sharing site Flickr were blocked in China in an attempt by the government to prevent online discussion on the subject. However twitterers were finding ways around this. Read more on BBC news.

WADA rule contravenes EU privacy laws

Good! Many parts of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) “whereabouts” rule contravene the bloc’s privacy laws, a key European Union (EU) panel will say next week.

WADA includes anti-doping rules that require Olympic-level athletes to disclose their locations every day. The World Anti-Doping Agency “whereabouts” rule went into effect on January 1. Read more at Reuters.

You need to ‘opt-out’ of Google Street View!

Street View UK is here to stay, says boss of Google MapsMike Harvey, Technology Correspondent, in San Francisco despite protests and formal complaints that accompanied its introduction in Britain last month. Google will continue to take pictures of the streets of Britain and put them online for its controversial Street View mapping service, the head of Google Maps has told The Times.

The company’s camera-equipped cars have been travelling around British streets since last year. The cars take images only on public roads and produce a seamless panoramic view of a particular street on a particular day.

Street View automatically blurs out images of people’s faces and car registrations, although the technology is not perfect. Anyone wishing to have images removed can contact Google which says most requests are processed within hours. Read more at the TimesOnLine.

Celebrities Big Brother ‘white trash’ brings in RFID for entertainment

The Celebrity Big Brother program has moved on to another dimension in their surveillance with the use of RFID on participants, just for our entertainment. It is pretty sad that we are a nation that feel entertained by such ‘white trash’. Have we nothing better to do with our time than to take part or watch these programs that encourage surveillance to a level of acceptance in a society where surveillance and location tracking is increasing on endemic scales.

I wonder how many of us come home each evening, and switch on the TV before even taking off our shoes, or changing our clothes to something more casual? I wonder how many of our brains are turning to vegetables as we sit in front of our TV to be enterained by this ‘white trash’? I wonder how many of us eat our dinner in front of the TV?

Thank goodness for blogging and social networking, for that our children are not lured by the ‘television generation’ that I guess that I am a part of. There is much negative to be said with children going online, but at least they need to think, act and make decisions whilst sat in front of their computer. Not like those of us that vegetate in front of the TV.

If you can think of any intelligent reason for the benefits of TV vegetation and this type of ‘white trash’ please share. I am always open to adapting my opinions if the arguments are compelling enough.