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.
Sting recently had to abandon a skiing holiday, as he was fed up with the crowd of amateur paparazzi following him around.
Russell Beattie was also violated this week, privacy-wise. While he was trying to activate his Boost mobile phone account, he was asked such intrusions as the age of his father and brother - not information he had ever given them.
The other area that springs to mind in this little rant is reputation. One of the next big boom areas (just my opinion) is online reputation management systems. These will collate data on all of us, specifically for prospective employees. Not only will resume/CV accuracy be monitored factually, colleagues' and managers' opinions might be collected, leaving no room to hide.
While you might reasonably object to having your name on these databases and possibly even succeed in requesting removal, this may be like being asked to be removed from the employment market altogether. After all, if you ask for removal, you must, de facto, have something to hide.
Article comments
1 - Nicolette Rivers
The whole thing gives me the creeps.
2 - dietdoc
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
3 - bhw
Reason 10,001 to freelance and work from home.
4 - DrPat
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)
5 - bhw
Thanks, DrPat!
6 - DrPat
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!
7 - bhw
She also always seems to know where I am and who I've been talking to.
8 - James Ackerson
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
9 - Cerulean
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.
10 - Nancy
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....
11 - Temple Stark
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