The Death Knell of Privacy
Published May 27, 2005
The Kansas City.com (free subscription required or sign in via my pals at the cheeky Bug Me Not) reports about a new service from Sprint, which got me thinking.
The Sprint Business Mobility Framework is a service that tracks employees' movements. It sends out alerts to management when they stray outside the designated Geofence and reports a "breadcrumb" trail of where they have been. Finally, it can tell managers which employee is nearest to a given point in the event of a service need - think the nearest taxi or plumber.
I've written about these kind of employee tracking devices before and especially about the insensitivity of the companies promoting such schemes. Their CEOs frequently make really funny quips about electric shock therapy and just manage to stop chortling about death squads to round up straying employees.
I've also pointed out that studies show that when employees are trusted, productivity increases. The opposite is true; when you patently don't trust people and use this kind of technology, you're encouraging them to try to beat the system. It doesn't take a genius to work out that these systems track devices, not people. So just as we used to clock mates in and clock them out, in the old days of punching bits of card, some employees will find themselves sitting in a warehouse surrounded by colleagues' mobile phones on Friday afternoons.
If your company is considering one of these services, you have a real personnel issue at the heart of the company and there's nothing for it - your Board of Directors must resign at once. Anyone who confuses treating a symptom, rather than the disease itself, simply lacks judgment.
In the UK, privacy died years ago as we happily allowed "them" to install CCTV cameras everywhere. So much so, that the average citizen living or working in an urban area gets filmed 70 or so times a day. This has led, among other things, to a rise in hoodies and base ball caps as fashion items among kids, as they seek to avoid identification.
Sure, wearing a hoodie doesn't make you a criminal. But just as low slung jeans was a homage to the hard homies who had gone to jail (and had their belts taken away) in urban America, hoodies nod at the hard kids who wear them with crime in mind.
And now Bliar wants everyone to carry ID cards. A truly unbelievable waste of public money, as what all these things have in common is that the crims always find a way 'round them and ordinary citizens are inconvenienced.
Next, we have the camera phone in every pocket - and soon it'll be a video phone. This means that any crime or private moment has a very good chance of being filmed. You snog your girlfriend with a bit of passion, to find a couple of kids are filming you. Or they preempt the action with a little Happy Slapping.
- The Death Knell of Privacy
- Published: May 27, 2005
- Type: Opinion
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Software, Culture: Society, Culture: Business and Economics
- Writer: Russell Buckley
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Russell Buckley writes: But just as low slung jeans was a homage to the hard homies who had gone to jail (and had their belts taken away) in urban America
Reply: Heck, I live in America and I didn't know that arcane bit of urban lore. Thanks, Russell! I find that, strangely, fascinating.
Cheers,
Ron
Free ASINs: 0874778379 (Secrets of Self-Employment [Working from Home]); 0142002488 (I Don't Know What I Want, But This Iin't It); 0314232354 (Employment Law in a Nutshell)
On the other hand, even though you can work half-days (and you get to pick which 12 hours to work, too...), when you work for yourself, you have a real jerk for a boss!
She also always seems to know where I am and who I've been talking to.
Its going to cause a great deal more "counter" operations and technical applications to become common place in the black market, such as interference or "white noise" generators that people carry to cause CCTV cameras and wireless functions to become unable to record your movements, ID scanning modules designed to do a "binary recovery" of a persons National ID's RFID tag, people making envelopes that block transmissions of data to any repeater from their equipment & Plastic cards they carry, cell phones having the particular frequencies for GPS being blocked and or physically disabled in the cell phone itself (just to name a few)
When "Big Brother" attempts to squeeze much harder, the results are going to be counter productive to the people controlling the system, its a shame to see that history has not been learned that when you try to control more then yourself, you only end up either dead or alone and completely forgotten about..
James
Yup. My credit and buying habits seemed to make me irrestible to people that sent junk mail. All of a sudden I was getting deluged with catalogs, including a number of companies whose mailing lists I firmly asked to be taken off (and had been). I also got stuff advertising fur coats and investments (someone was deluded). And they are no longer taking you off or keeping you off the lists if you request to be. They somehow all make "mistakes" but if you write to the CEO, it happens instantly, not in the two months they say it takes. I did that a while ago and finally got my mail box cleared. I now have to write to the CEO of each company. That's ridicilous, and the funny thing is I would have been happy to have some catalogs in they were reasonable about it. I billed some of these companies for their insolence.
Where did you get the CEO names for these trash factories? I keep telling them to lay off and they don't, even tho I update my 'no junk mail' registration with the Direct Mail consortium every 6-7 months! This all started with the goddamned marketers. I hope all marketing and advertising people spend eternity in hell, I really do. I've written and nagged and screamed at my representatives to get some laws on the books whereby no damned company can collect, sell, rent, hold, or otherwise be in possession of our private information without our express written consents, but of course since they're all in the pay of the industry lobbiests, nothing of the sort is ever going to happen, even in the aftermath of these big data ripoffs recently. This is a subject that drives me into apoplexy every time. I shouldn't have logged on to this one....
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The whole thing gives me the creeps.