RFID Chips: A Privacy And Security Pandora's Box?

"The team counter the argument that honest citizens have nothing to fear from RFID. "A surveillance society where RFID tags reveal personal information and enable the tracking and tracing of the individuals, shall be contested, as every law-abiding citizen should be free from any kind of monitoring," they say."

If you are able to be tracked with this chip, would you still get it?



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081118141854.htm

Is your privacy being invaded?

Not many people are aware of how easy it is to get information from credit cards, lisences, and pass ports, they all are a type of microchip that can be scanned from a distance and Todd Lewen decided to put it to the test. He sat in his car with a system he bought for just $180.00 and was able to scan credit cards, passports, and the RFID chips implanted in certain people, basically anything with a barcode he was able to scan and withhold information. If someone can do all that for $180.00, imagine if this got into the hands of very shady people, more and more identities could be getting stolen with the advancment of technology. Where do you draw the line?



http://www.examiner.com/x-6495-US-Intelligence-Examiner~y2009m7d13-Microchip-security-questions-Is-your-privacy-being-invaded

Creepiness Factor

"The creepiness factor is a risk inherent in so-called behavioral targeting. This practice is based on marketers anonymously observing a user's behavior on the Internet and compiling a personal profile based on interests and behavior -- sites visited, searches conducted, articles read, even emails written and received. Based on their profiles, users receive advertising targeted specifically to them, regardless of where they travel on the web.

Consumer advocates worry that online data collection and tracking is going too far. Marketing executives counter that consumers benefit from seeing advertising relevant to their interests and contend that relinquishing some personal data is a reasonable trade-off for free access to Internet content, much of it supported by advertising."

I found this to be very interesting because in the article Fran Maier had just been diagnosed with a heart condition and a few days later she was getting junk mail about heart conditions and things to help it. If I would in her shoes I would be VERY creeped out and I would think someone is getting into personal information.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1999

Video Surveillance for your Home

So doing all these readings on security cameras I decided to look up some sites and to see how hard it really is to set these things up. Well I found a do it yourself website that sells cameras you can set up outside or inside your home and it's easy to do and very well priced, check it out.

http://www.surveillance-video.com/

Employers watching Employees

In New Jersey the employers of a major company went onto MySpace.com and made a discussion forum about your place of work and invited all their employees to engage in conversation, the only thing the employees didn't know is was that the company was behind it. After the employees engaged in discussion and bad mouthed some of the head bosses at the job, they were soon fired, but the company sees nothing wrong with this.

The same thing happened with the popular restaurant in Hackensack, NJ, Houstons. The bar tenders engaged in the online discussion and once the owners of restaurant found out and read what they all had to say, anyone who part took in the bad mouthing was soon fired.

I personally think this is wrong, to fire someone for speaking their mind, especially when it was never intended to make its way back to the boss. Do you think this should be grounds or termination?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124045009224646091.html

Google- too close for comfort?

Kalin, a resident in SanFran, decided to google maps her own location one day, and if you have ever done so it is at street level. Kalin was looking at her apartment window and could see her cat in the window, a clear photo, and this freaked Kalin out. If google maps could see her cat in the window, imagine what else it would do with a better camera. Kalin had put in reports for quite sometime but she just became known as the crazy cat woman. It was until she went public with it that someone actually decided to give her some answers. Although google understands her concern, it also helps with the safety of the neighborhood and garentees that the images/videos is just for locations and that no one would ever be zooming in to spy on someone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/technology/01private.html

Corporations spying on employees behind their backs

Deutsche Telekom, a major company in Germany has been hacking into thousands of their employees, cell phones, emails, and computers and keep records of everything on them. They say they are doing it for security measures to make sure no one is being dishonest in the company but do they really need to go as far as going into people's email, cell phones and so on?

It went even farther then monitoring their phones and emails, they had cameras watching their every move, how many times each employee went to the bathroom, if any of them were falling in love with each other and to see who was slacking on the job. It seems that this company is going a little too far with the surveillance.



http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/23/world/fg-germany-spying23