When I said “Ubiquitous Surveillance”
was coming, did you understand what that meant?
UK:
Oxford City Council’s plans to install CCTV in taxis concerns
privacy advocates
November 14, 2011 by Dissent
Oliver Evans reports:
All
conversations will be recorded in Oxford’s taxis by
controversial new CCTV cameras, which critics last night claimed
broke privacy rules.
The plan for the
city’s 662 taxis was last night branded an “absolute invasion of
privacy”.
But Oxford City
Council said the video and audio scheme was vital to
provide evidence of attacks on drivers and in cases where
there were allegations of driver misconduct.
Recordings would
not be accessed unless requested by the police or council licensing
officers for a specific crime or licensing issue, it said. [Do
you believe that? Bob]
Read more in The
Oxford Times. Audio and video recording by CCTV
is already in effect in buss and trains.
In a companion editorial on this issue,
The Oxford Times writes:
Safety for
passengers and drivers in Oxford’s taxis is a significant concern,
but not one that allows council officials to ride roughshod over
rights to reasonable privacy.
Oxford City
Council’s scheme to introduce CCTV for all the city’s 662
licensed taxis had already proved controversial before we discovered
that all conversations would be recorded as well.
Such
a blanket scheme would seem to breach the Information Commissioner’s
code of practice on the issue. It says recording
conversations is unlikely to be justified and that sound on CCTV
should usually be turned off. It refers to recording in a cab
occurring only if a panic button is pressed.
Yet Oxford City
Council does not believe it is flouting this code, saying the risk of
intrusion is acceptable compared to public safety.
Read more on The
Oxford Times.
(Related)
The
Drone Threat to Privacy
November 14, 2011 by Dissent
John Villasenor reports:
Technology, as
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2001 Supreme Court
opinion, has the power “to
shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.” Few other
technologies have as much power to do this as drones. Because they
can perch hundreds or thousands of meters in the air, drones
literally add a new dimension to the ability to eavesdrop. They can
see into backyards and into windows that look out onto enclosed
spaces not visible from the street. They can monitor wi-fi signals
or masquerade as mobile phone base stations, intercepting
phone calls before passing them along. Using a network of
drones, it would be possible to follow the movements of every vehicle
in a city—a capability that would be invaluable to a police
department tracking the getaway car in a bank robbery but invasive if
used to track a patient driving to a clinic to get treatment for a
confidential medical condition.
Read more on
Scientific American. This is the second part of their series on
security and privacy in drone warfare. Part 1 was The
Drone Threat to National Security.
What do you say, law school students?
Is your Facebook past clean enough to repeat this challenge in the
US? (Even failure would teach us something.)
Austrian
student takes on Facebook
Austrian law student Max Schrems may be
just one of about 800 million Facebook users, but that hasn't stopped
him tackling the US giant behind the social networking website over
its privacy policy.
The 24-year-old wasn't sure what to
expect when he requested Facebook provide him with a record of the
personal data it holds on him, but he certainly wasn't ready for the
1,222 pages of information he received.
… "When you delete something from Facebook, all you are
doing is hiding it from yourself," Schrems told AFP in his home
city of Vienna.
Shocked, Schrems decided to act. Hitting a dead end in Austria, he
took his complaints in August to the Data Protection Commissioner
(DPC) in Ireland, where Facebook has its European headquarters.
Believing that Facebook was contravening European Union law, and had
more data on him that it is not releasing, Schrems has filed 22
complaints with the DPC, details of which can be found on his
website: http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/
"It's a shock of civilisations.
Americans don't understand the concept of data
protection.
… The DPC said it aims to complete its audit on Facebook, which
was planned even before Schrems filed his complaints, by the end of
2011.
If it finds Facebook to have been in the wrong, it can ask the
company to mend its ways, and if the firm refuses, a
court could then fine it up to 100,000 euros ($136,400). [Chump
change Bob]
(Related) Unfortunately, I think this
will substitute for true privacy laws – “We educated them, they
can now choose to give up their privacy.”
November 13, 2011
European
Security Agency Report - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging
applications
- To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications, November 11, 2011 via European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) - "European Union (EU) agency which acts as a centre of expertise for the EU Member States and European institutions. It gives advice and recommendations on good practice, and acts as a “switchboard” for exchanging knowledge and information. The agency also facilitates contacts between the European institutions, the Member States, and private business and industry."
- "Recording aspects of one’s life, or life-logging, has a long established history in human society, but it is undergoing transformational change in terms of depth, volume and type of data. Before the 20th century, life-logging was restricted to recordings on paper media and involved written accounts, such as books, diaries, or collections of letters between people as well as person-constructed images such as drawings or paintings. By the 20th century, the media had broadened to include still photographic images, sound and moving images and most families kept at least an image life-log in the form of a photo album. By the end of the 20th century, most of these life-log data were digitally recorded with both the resolution and frequency of recording dramatically increasing year on year. Paper diaries and letters gave way to blogs, e-mail, and social networking status updates with the significant difference that the latter were potentially recorded forever and with a vastly more complete history than the episodic fragments of days gone by."
- Appendix I Scenario Building and Analysis Template, accompanying the deliverable "To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications".
- Appendix II Risk Assessment Spreadsheet, accompanying the deliverable "To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications"
Perhaps I should purchase
“PennState.xxx”
"Schools nationwide, including
The University of Missouri and Washington University, are snapping
up .xxx domain names to avoid people making porn sites with their
names in the url. The new .xxx domain will be launched later this
year, and before that, everyone with a trademark will have the
opportunity to reserve names during what's called a "sunrise
period". Someone is promoting the possible horrors of what
could happen as a way to sell these domains, which cost up to $200
dollars per domain per year. Even though these schools may
already be protected from defamation and trademark infringement, they
still feel compelled to buy these names."
(Related)
Porn
Legend Sasha Grey Reads to 1st Graders, School Attempts Cover-Up
… A rep for the school district is
flatly denying Sasha was ever inside one of its classrooms -- telling
TMZ, "We have several celebrities who read to our students each
year. The actress you have indicated [Sasha] was not present."
Clearly, the photos we obtained show
otherwise.
Clive
Thompson on Why Kids Can’t Search
… Pan grimly concluded that
students aren’t assessing information sources on their own
merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.
Other studies have found the same
thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,”
but they’re wretched at searching.
… Who’s to blame? Not the
students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability
to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s
No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on
prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time
kids get to college, professors assume they already
have this skill. [Not in my experience... Bob] The buck
stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not
only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also
offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.
… Mind you, mastering “crap
detection 101,” as digital guru Howard Rheingold dubs it, isn’t
easy. One prerequisite is that you already know a
lot about the world. For instance, Harris found that
students had difficulty distinguishing a left-wing parody of the
World Trade Organization’s website from the real WTO site. Why?
Because you need to understand why someone would want to parody it in
the first place—knowledge the average eighth grader does not yet
possess.
In other words, Google makes
broad-based knowledge more important, not less. A good education is
the true key to effective search. But until our kids have that,
let’s make sure they don’t always take PageRank at its word.
An interesting article, but it sounds
like technology is being used to reduce cost rather than improve
education.
My
Teacher Is an App
… Teachers give short lectures and
offer one-on-one help, but most learning is self-directed and online.
"If
it seems strange, that's because it is strange," says Alberto
Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami schools. But he sees no point
in forcing the iPod generation to adapt to a classroom model that has
changed little in 300 years. [How about “forcing”
schools to adapt to modern (post-chalkboard) technology? Bob]
The drive to reinvent school has also
set off an explosive clash with teachers unions and backers of more
traditional education. Partly, it's a philosophical divide. Critics
say that cyberschools turn education into a largely utilitarian
pursuit: Learn content, click ahead. They mourn the lack of
discussion, fear kids won't be challenged to take risks, and fret
about devaluing the softer skills learned in classrooms.
[Sounds like they're doing it wrong. Bob]
Because it came up recently, here is a
quick overview for finding and removing Flash Cookies.
An
Introduction to Flash Cookies; How to Manage Them
Apparently, my former students think I
need this stuff...
YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2011 when...
1. You
accidentally enter your PIN on the microwave.
2. You haven't
played solitaire with real cards in years.
3. You have a list
of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
4. You e-mail and
text the person who works at the desk next to you.
5. Your reason for
not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have
e-mail or text addresses.
6. You pull up in
your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to
help you carry in the groceries...
7. Every
commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen
8. Leaving the
house without your cell phone, which you didn't even have the first
20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you
turn around to go and get it.
10. You get up in
the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.
11. You start
tilting your head sideways to smile. : )
12 You are too
busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.
13. You actually
scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list
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