According to this article, law enforcement used face-matching technology to compare the faces of Super Bowl spectators with a database of known criminals/suspicious persons. They claim that this system is less intrusive than normal video surveillance. I disagree. The difference is that nobody looks at surveillance tapes unless something happens. In this case, they're investigating you before anything has happened. On the other hand, maybe it's more like the dogs that sniff luggage for drugs or bombs. Regardless, people should be made aware that they are being watched like that.
The Super Bowl half-time show was really lame. As I watched it, I had but one thought: this is so corporate. I mean, think about it. The selection of "musicians" chosen to perform totally smacked of "synergies." Not to mention two of them (Britney Spears and N' Sync) are two of the most "made" performers on the music scene today. Let me just point out that these are the most popular musical acts on MTV, which is owned by Viacom, parent company of CBS, the station that brought us the Super Bowl. Sting and Nelly are on Universal (or a subsidiary label), another of the Big Five music labels, while Aerosmith is on Columbia (Sony). I wonder who owns the NFL....
So I'm stuck on hold with Chase bank. When setting up access to my account with Quicken, I was told that Chase is currently authorized to share my account and other personal information with other corporations. There was a law passed recently that granted this right to financial institutions. They had to inform customers, but it was an opt-out rather than an opt-in. Clearly Congress got effectively lobbied by the financial industry here. So I made a second call to Chase customer service (because the person at the first number couldn't do this and couldn't transfer me) and wade through another phone menu to talk to a customer service rep. I explain what I want, then get put on hold because this rep has to talk to a "product specialist" who can do this. So she gets put on hold (she claims), so I get put on hold. I get put on hold three times at a few minutes a pop, listening to the same minute-long fragment of a piano song every time. Finally after about 20 minutes on the phone with multiple Chase reps, I get it done. Makes me not feel bad about going on the can while talking to her.
So clearly this is wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if Chase made this process difficult just to dissuade people from getting their information taken off limits. After all, I've done the same sort of thing in my job. The difference is, of course, my job is for a website that only demands an email address, country, and date of birth (for COPPA-compliance). I do not have a record of all of an individual's financial transactions. Nor do I have a social security number, mother's maiden name, or any other, more sensitive information. Clearly Congress was not acting in the best interests of Americans. While the Supreme Court has stated that privacy is a necessary adjunct to freedom of association, and there is the Fourth Amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"), neither is explicit in stating general privacy as a right in and of itself; rather, they support privacy in certain conditions as necessary to advance other primary rights. I think it is time, in this day and age where so much information on individuals is kept by entities outside their control, that American's have an explicit Constitutional right to privacy. The framers could not have seen this coming two centuries ago. Such an amendment would also prevent the so-called "tyranny of convenience," where an entity could effectively coerce an agreement to share personal information by making it sufficiently convenient to do so and sufficiently inconvenient not do, by providing a basis and impetus for Congress to climb out of the banking industry's pocket and make laws with teeth. Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
I'm seeing more and more sites requiring cookies simply to browse the site. For instance, I was looking up locations for a clothing retailer. They used MSN Expedia as a source for their maps. Fair enough. But apparently just to look at the map, I have to allow all sorts of .expedia.msn.com and .msn.com cookies to be set. Just to look at one image. Law.com won't let you read any articles without using cookies. They're somewhat less intelligent about it; they try to set the cookie and then check it in javascript embedded in the page. If you disable javascript, you can view the articles just fine. Or you could download them using a non-graphical client like curl or wget and view it locally. But that ignores the point. I can think of no instance where cookies can be justified on technical grounds. Session management is a solved problem. Now, transparent logins are convenient, but that's it for cookies. Mainly, I think the website programmers are just lazy. Either that or some exec made a bone-headed decision to try to coerce the web-browsing population at large to enable cookies. Of course, I'll just go elsewhere. And when that becomes too difficult, no doubt there will be a plugin for Mozilla that allows you to specify that certain sites get random values for the cookies they set. Trying to coerce users with this sort of strong-arming is stupid and counter-productive. At best, they set off an arms race with those trying to circumvent these measures. At worst, they drive customers away. Why go through all that trouble when they can accomplish 99% of what they want by doing a tiny amount more work (in many cases, most of which they're already doing)? Audiogalaxy still works in Lynx! The whole point of this web business is that anybody can do it. And yet we still find publishers of all shapes and sizes trying to lock users into their own fenced of pieces of the web. Companies who long for the early 90s when the only access was Compuserve or AOL or Prodigy, completely controlled environments. Not only do people not want that, it's obvious that people don't want that. Look at the number of people subscribed to an online service in 1995 and compare it to today. These people don't understand how to serve us, plain and simple.
If you insist on using Internet Explorer, this thing rocks: AdShield Banner Ad Blocker. Get one of the benefits of Mozilla without Mozilla. Really easy. Really effective.
A UT student is being investigated by the FBI and Secret Service for filing a Freedom of Information request for information on the maintenance tunnels under UT. It seems a little ridiculous; it was a freshman rite of passage to go running around the maintenance tunnels at Rice. Beyond that, my concern is that they felt it was pertinent to pester him about whether he was a member of UT Watch, the ACLU, or other "activist organizations." Nobody has ever in their wildest, fevered imaginings ever connected either of those organizations to even minor violence, but somehow it's ok for the feds to treat association with them as some kind of unsavory, immoral act.
We got selected to participate in a test run of the census. The Census Bureau is verifying their procedures and systems in preparation for the 2010 census. The questions asked are pretty innocuous, but I still found myself reluctant to answer fully and completely. Being the introspective, analytical sort, I tried to figure out why. After all, I am required by law to answer, and the forms repeatedly state that violation of my privacy by Census Bureau employees is punishable by law
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. I realized that I have been trained to be suspicious of any instance in which I am asked to provide personal information without an obvious need for it. It could be the cashier asking for my home phone number, which they never get. It could be some web service not related to email that nonetheless wants my email address. It could be the gas station asking for my zip code
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. Every day, I refuse intrusions into my privacy by parties that do not work for me and do not have my best interests at heart. The Census Bureau may be sincere and perfect in protecting my privacy, but the government has done a poor job overall
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. I have been trained to be on my guard constantly, to be instantly suspicious of anyone asking personal questions. The Census Bureau may be trustworthy, but I deal with so many parties that are not that it is very hard to overcome my conditioning. The failure of the government to protect me thus reduces the breadth and quality of legitimate information-gathering efforts such as the Census.
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I did note that it says nothing about Bureau policy decisions that reveal my information, just actions by individual, presumably rogue, employees. Maybe that's excessively paranoid, but it just serves to reinforce my main point: I am trained to look for loopholes, too.
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Which turned out to be a fraud-avoidance measure, but was peremptorily demanded without that explanation.
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Be it state governments selling driver's license records, the federal government allowing companies to use the Social Security Number for purposes other than Social Security, or the general failure of either to pass comprehensive and effective legislation on privacy. That doesn't even get into things like Total Information Awareness, Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (and CAPPS II), DCS1000 (a.k.a., Carnivore), or the illegal NSA electronic surveillance ordered by President Bush. I could go on for a very long time listing examples like this.