Friday, September 07, 2012

Think privacy is threatened today? You ain't seen nothin' yet...

Only a century ago, most people were known only by name and occupation. Records of your great-grandparents’ existence were likely limited to birth records, baptismal records, death records, census records, the purchase of a home, and perhaps the payment of property tax. Even this information was generally filed and forgotten, because of the considerable expense involved in paying clerks to organize it.

Your great-grandparents could purchase primitive telephones, automobiles, and electric appliances, if they could afford them. However, no systematic recordkeeping existed of the phone calls they made or where they drove in their vehicle. Of course, no cell phones existed, no Internet, and no biometric tools to identify anyone other than basic fingerprinting.

Fast-forward from 1912 to 2012, and we enter a very different era. Here are a few examples from my files:

Mobile police biometric systems. Here in Arizona, police and sheriff’s departments statewide have rolled out a system called the “Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System,” or MORIS. This is a device that slides over an iPhone. An officer simply snaps a photo of your face and runs the image through software that hunts for a match in a criminal records database. MORIS can scan your face up to four feet away, potentially without you being aware of it. Naturally, the law doesn’t consider this a “search,” and you need not consent to this intrusion. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. X-Ray body-scanning vans raise major privacy concerns...
  2. The new totalitarianism of surveillance technology...
  3. US drone spies: if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear,right?
  4. Big 'black box' brother to spy on UK mail, phones, social networks...
  5. The rise of the global police state...
  6. Cell-phones are the new bat signals...
  7. Bigger Brother: Total surveillance comes to UK...
  8. TSA will be tracking all "daily travels to work, grocery stores and social events..."

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