As anyone who reads much of my site knows, I'm not a fan of how RFID is being implemented. However, I'm not against the technology itself as it has many practical uses. For example, some hotels have begun putting washable RFID in the towels and bathrobes to keep people from stealing them.

Since the RFID towels have no privacy invading purpose at all and serve deter self-entitled punks who think it's ok to take hotel items, I will offer my tentative support for this. The main concern is feature creep meaning that depending how they implement this, they may also know which towels you used and when. I can't really see the hotels bothering to do so, but if they did, that would be crossing the line big time.

Source: http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/gee-how-did-that-towel-end-up-in-my-suitcase/ (H/T to The Consumerist for the link)

You know a good way to spot a terrorist? Look for someone who looks and acts like one (like they do in Israel)!

I know this ridiculous concept of banning profiling came out of the dark days of racism where people were profiles on things that didn't matter like the color of your skin. But that doesn't mean that profiling is wrong.

People profile all the time and they should. If you walk out to your car late at night and there's younger male with ratty clothes staring you down while sharpening a machete, should you keep walking since you "don't want to offend him by running the hell away"?

Give it a rest folks. If the TSA didn't have to give kids and the elderly the same attention as someone who's actually likely to be a terrorist, imagine how much smoother and simpler flying would be.

FTC

(Image is in the Public Domain)

The Federal Trade Commission proposed a new standard of privacy in American Industry recently:

“Despite some good actors, self-regulation of privacy has not worked adequately and is not working adequately for American consumers,” Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the trade commission, said. “We’d like to see companies work a lot faster to make consumer choice easier.”

No kidding? Companies won't regulate themselves? Unbelievable!

Anyway, the article goes on to say:

The online advertising industry, Mr. Zaneis said, would suffer “significant economic harm” if the government controlled the do-not-track mechanism and there was “a high participation rate similar to that of do not call.” Mr. Zaneis said the industry would continue to build upon a self-regulatory framework and had recently put in place the use of icons on select online advertisements that allow users to opt out of customized advertising.

Oh boo hoo! Companies that have been tracking and tagging you like cattle would be upset if they had to stop. Waa.

Whether or not the FTC will get traction with this is uncertain, but it won't matter much if it's built into the browser AS IT SHOULD BE. Fortunately, Firefox at least is looking into this in an upcoming version.

This isn't what it would look like though...

It'd be nice if they could post an actual picture of a backscatter scan instead of a full x-ray, but this is still pretty cool. I personally wouldn't buy one since I'd rather not be scanned at all than try to make a statement after the fact.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

I am constantly telling people to lock down their privacy settings because if you keep this stuff visible, this kind of story becomes possible. Apparently there was a debt collector that spammed friends and family of a debtor in order to pressure her to pay.

Melanie Beacham says she fell behind on her car payment after getting sick and taking a medical leave from work. She contacted MarkOne Financial to explain the situation but says the harassing phone calls, as many as 20 per day, kept coming. Then one day she got a call from her sister saying the company contacted her in Georgia. "I was telling her, 'No way, because you're not even a reference,'" said Beacham, who later found out MarkOne contacted her sister and other relatives via Facebook.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Check these out 🙂

Also a series of current articles and links about the issue here.

And finally a story of a pat down that's been resurrected from 2002 by Penn of Penn and Teller.

The TSA has constantly said that photos from the nudie scanners wouldn't be stored so how did we get : this story of nudie scanners where over 35000 photos were stored. Whoops.

To be fair, this wasn't the TSA, but US Marshalls in an Orlando courthouse, but the technology makes it possible. If the only thing that stops someone from recording a pic is a setting on the machine, I don't feel very safe.

I've never liked Mint.com. Not because they're bad at what they do (they're not), but because you have to give them too much access to take advantage of it. So you get a little money management help, so what? You have to give away your password to do it. Not only that, Mint is (surprise, surprise) using all that juicy data you provide for their own purposes.

For now, it seems that they're not actually telling you who purchased what, but there's no telling when and if they'll start selling your valuable personal data to 3rd parties. Until then, showing truly anonymous purchase information is kind of neat so long as they don't take it further than that.

I've never liked Mint.com. Not because they're bad at what they do (they're not), but because you have to drop your trousers to take advantage of it. So you get a little money management help, so what? You have to give away your password to do it. Not only that, Mint is (surprise, surprise) using all that juicy data you provide for their own purposes.

For now, it seems that they're not actually telling you who purchased what, but there's no telling when and if they'll start selling your valuable personal data to 3rd parties (maybe they are already). Until then, showing truly anonymous purchase information is kind of neat so long as they don't take it further than that.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

So the first problem is that Australia is in a head-to-head race with the UK to see which country can lose their freedoms first. The newest chapter in this sad saga of Australia's descent into becoming a China clone is a high school that requires fingerprint identification for students to check in.

Though the privacy violating principal foolishly thought that by tracking fingerprints he could defeat students who used other students to "swipe in" for them previously. However, research which is available online shows how to defeat these with only gummi bears.

So if you're an Australian student at Gosford's Henry Kendall High School who thinks this privacy invasion is crap, check out this article that shows the research you can use to defeat the fingerprint scanners.