Friday, February 14, 2014

And Then Some Politics

Utah has introduced legislation to ban the use of traffic cameras that capture and identify car license plates.  This type of software is typically used with traffic light cameras and there is concern about extension of that to include capturing license plate information for every car.  That could then be used to track where people are going and, to some extent, what they're doing.

The company that makes the device that does the capturing is suing under the premise that its free speech rights are being compromised.  (AP News:  License-reader firm says new law curbs free speech)

The lawsuit is frivolous but the traffic camera situation is not and a great many people are livid about them.  At this point, with so many in-place, they're probably unstoppable.


Freedom of medical information

I said the other day that I would want to know if my kid has a genetic vulnerability toward addiction and I might as well extend that to knowing about any of my kid's genetic diseases.  The response was why not implant a chip at birth that has this information and abandon any pretense of privacy.

This one seems inevitable also as carrying your health records on some biochip inside you could be a tremendous health benefit, particularly in an emergency.  I also don't see any reason to pretend there is privacy as any individual information is stored by insurance companies already.

There are lots of security considerations as maybe you envision a sci-fi tracking in which they can follow your movements by satellite by tracking your internal chip.  Maybe they could but does it even matter.  What they can do really isn't the problem.  What people let them do is a very big problem.

No comments: