Regulations mean quite a lot. Regulations that state that a breach of confidentiality is grounds for revoking the company's right to do business can have a major impact. Another aspect is litigation. Sell protected data and be sued out of business.
Try to compare apples to apples. The location of a vehicle is very different from credit card information. The former does not make you liable for someone else's purchases and therefore directly impact your financial stability.
The camera issues is an interesting one but you do not go far enough in your description of what happens. The more cameras that are around the more money is made by the city and company, the more traffic violators are caught, the fewer accidents occur and the fewer people get hurt or killed. You also forget that the clause in the contract that states that information collected by the system may nat be sold or transfered. If the company does this they make no more money. Not a good choice for the company.
Once the information can be seen by anyone on the street it is no longer "your" information. Are you going to sue everyone who says "I just saw Screwmaster down at the bar last week"?
Since all that is in the database is the license plate, time stamp and location, I do not see the problem. There is no link between the license number and any other personal, and therefore confidential, information in the database. As to the usefulness of the information that is collected, the repo man just does a search on the license number to find the locations.
There is the issue; your definition of privacy is not the same as my definition of privacy. On one extreme you seem to say that no entity should be able to gather any information about someone that they specifically have not divulged and only to that specific entity.I, on the other hand, have the view that if the information can be gathered by a person using their eyes and ears then it is fine.
Too many of these discussions come down to privacy for the sake of privacy and not the good that a new process or technology can do. Yes, many new technologies can be miss-used but proper regulation or industry standard can eliminate those issues.
For example, there is a mandate that every cell phone must be able to be located to a certain degree of accuracy 98% of the time in the US. This is so that 911 calls can be handled correctly. Cell phones without GPS are located by triangulation. Privacy "advocate"; "Oh my god anyone will be able to track me at any time". Not true, the regulations state who and when this information is made available. It has also created a huge industry in location based information inclusing such apps as "FriendFinder".
Tracking cell phones requires access to confidential information available only to the carriers and authorized people hence a reasonable assumption of privacy. A vehicle tag is available to anyone looking at it and therefore no reasonable assumption of privacy. See the difference?
The fact that vehicle tag information is collected in a database and sold does not change the fact that it is not confidential.
Sorry by carrying a cell phone does not place a tag on you butt with you name and address. Location information for a cell phone is not available to a person standing next to you but a car license number is available to anyone looking at the car.
Anything that can be legally done by a person can be legally done by a computer.
For example, when I walk into a small store the shop keeper may do the following; scan my face, match that face to my name, remember what I have purchased, greet me by name and suggest similar items and sale items. Just because some of those steps are done by machine does not bother me. Now if all that information was posted on the internet that would be a problem.
I have no assumption of privacy if I walk into a store that I have been to before; someone working there may, and hopefully will, recognize me (I like personalized service).
"Public record" as it applies to a municipality is is different from tag scanning. Am I wrong or can anyone, no matter what the reason, request and be given access to information on the public record? The need for a request is that the information must be gathered by a municipal employee and the reason for fees is to cover the cost of gathering the information. There are many cases in which public record information is put up on web sites and is available at no charge to anyone with an internet connection.
Another difference is that some "public record" information is contained on forms that are submitted to the city and the submitter may think that the city's confidentiality rules would apply to that information. This may constitute reasonable assumption of privacy. On the other hand the information that a vehicle with a certain tag is located and a certain place is plastered on the vehicle and available to anyone looking at that vehicle.
From a legal standpoint there is nothing wrong with this. The fact that a vehicle with a certain license number is at a certain location is public information and there is no reasonable assumption of privacy. Anyone walking down the street can gather this information. The use of vehicles and tag scanners just makes it faster. If they were logging license numbers of vehicles in locked garages, private property not visible from the street, etc then there would be an issue as there is an assumption of privacy and laws (B&E, trespassing, etc) would have to be broken to obtain the information.
This service just centralizes what is already done by the parking authority of every major city; ever watch "Parking Wars"? All it does is allows more organizations access to the same database of vehicle locations.
Who is able to obtain this information is a different story. Either by regulation or industry standard this information should only be given to organizations who have a legitimate need for it; repo, law enforcement, etc. It should not be given to every person who wants to track someone else. Stalking is a concern and should be addressed.
The use of public information and technology to catch deadbeats and lawbreakers is not a bad thing.
While it's true that some portion of your customers are going to lie when they say there has been no water intrusion, including, at extra cost a device aimed at proving that your customer is lying on every device is unfair. Let alone close to the external extremedies of the device.
Consumer devices need to be built to withstand the normal environments they will be used in. Surprise, people sometimes come into a warm building from the cold outside.
Quite simply; put the phone in a warmer spot like a pants pocket for a few minutes before going inside. Keep the phone in a purse for a few minutes so it can warm up gradually.
This is how the indicators work. Get them slightly damp by condensation enough time and they may indicate water. That is enough moisture to damage electronics. The Indicators are not failing; they are working as designed.
There are no contacts involved in this process. Look at this this. It is basically a compound that changes colour when exposed to enough water. No electricity involved.
This has been going on for years namely any time anyone tries to download content that the the US government considers military in nature including encryption software.
I doubt that at the end of that course everyone could create a 3D model of a building. Just because there may be simple and obvious aspects to something (drawing lines, measurements, etc) does not mean that the end product is simple and obvious. Chess for example, the rules and movement of each piece is simple and obvious but playing chess is not.
Sorry, I took drafting in high school. If drafting was "simple and obvious" there would be no need for classes, some at university level, to teach it. Are there two year college courses in alphabetization? There are in drafting.
Where does the word "creative" come in. I was talking about the article about "sweat of the brow". Since the average adult can alphabetize a list of names and phone numbers (the facts) it is not copyrighted under this ruling. Likewise, since the average person, even if given the list of data points (which are the facts), could not create a 3D model from them it is copyrightable under this ruling.
You missed a key point of the the rejection; "The arrangement and presentation of a collection may be original, but not if it is "simple and obvious" such as a list in alphabetical or chronological order." The arrangement of 3D data is neither "simple" nor "obvious" for the reasons I already stated. If you disagree ask an average adult to create a 3D model of a building.
I would say yes if you live in Australia or the US; a date and time that two teams will play is a fact and under this ruling a fact or list of facts is not copyrightable.
A list of interesting names is not a fact in that it is formed by the creative selection of names by a person or group of people. In all probability no two lists created by different groups would be the same therefore there is creativity in the creation of the list. One could publish something stating that a name was on the list because that is a fact but not just copy the whole list.
I disagree. The fact that the Washington monument 555 feet and 5 1/8 inches tall is not copyrightable but a 3-D model may be. The model must have some form of coordinate system. It must have some sort or relationship between the coordinates. It must have some indication of what is solid and what is not. This is much more than simple facts.
If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings. Think of how much it would cost to 3D model New York City.
Cleaning as in dirt, spills, erasable markers etc. You would not want to waste $3.30 just because of a little coffee. The website says they can be washed with water then dried before re-use. There are also documents that are confidential that should be erased before putting back into the sheet pile.
I keep having to do math to debunk so many reports. The page that uses.3 yen as the sheet cost does not take into account sheets that are not returned. They are calculating it as if it is a closed system where every sheet print will be returned in re-printable condition. Pages can be lost, damaged , written on, or stored and never returned. The true cost of using these sheets is as follows;
((purchase cost) + (replacement cost of non returned sheets))/cycle size
Replacement cost is the cost to replace each failed sheet (damaged or not returned) over the life of one page as follows; (purchase cost * failure rate * cycle size)
Therefore with a purchase cost of 300yen, a failure rate of 10% (I am being generous) and a cycle of 1000 the cost per printing would be;
(300 +(300*.1*1000))/1000 = 30yen.
Even with the questionable power costs added that would be almost 4 times as expensive as plain paper.
Bump that up to a 30% failure and you get a cost of 91 yen/printing and 11x the cost of plain paper. To the "no shedding costs" comments; there is still a cost to erase the pages before they are returned to the printer for recycling.
They also do not factor the cost of collecting, sorting and cleaning the returned pages .
Another aspect not touched on is print speed. According to the specifications the printer takes 3 to 6 seconds per page to print. I am talking about the commercial printers not the desktop version. Yeah I am going to wait ten minutes to print 100 pages. That is very poor throughput.
You are suggesting giving a $3.30 piece of paper to a student and expecting them to do the following;
Not fold it;
Not staple it;
Not write on it and
return it to you. If you get back 10% of the paper you hand out you will be lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
Regulations mean quite a lot. Regulations that state that a breach of confidentiality is grounds for revoking the company's right to do business can have a major impact.
Another aspect is litigation. Sell protected data and be sued out of business.
Try to compare apples to apples. The location of a vehicle is very different from credit card information. The former does not make you liable for someone else's purchases and therefore directly impact your financial stability.
The camera issues is an interesting one but you do not go far enough in your description of what happens. The more cameras that are around the more money is made by the city and company, the more traffic violators are caught, the fewer accidents occur and the fewer people get hurt or killed. You also forget that the clause in the contract that states that information collected by the system may nat be sold or transfered. If the company does this they make no more money. Not a good choice for the company.
Once the information can be seen by anyone on the street it is no longer "your" information. Are you going to sue everyone who says "I just saw Screwmaster down at the bar last week"?
Since all that is in the database is the license plate, time stamp and location, I do not see the problem. There is no link between the license number and any other personal, and therefore confidential, information in the database. As to the usefulness of the information that is collected, the repo man just does a search on the license number to find the locations.
There is the issue; your definition of privacy is not the same as my definition of privacy. On one extreme you seem to say that no entity should be able to gather any information about someone that they specifically have not divulged and only to that specific entity.I, on the other hand, have the view that if the information can be gathered by a person using their eyes and ears then it is fine.
Too many of these discussions come down to privacy for the sake of privacy and not the good that a new process or technology can do. Yes, many new technologies can be miss-used but proper regulation or industry standard can eliminate those issues.
For example, there is a mandate that every cell phone must be able to be located to a certain degree of accuracy 98% of the time in the US. This is so that 911 calls can be handled correctly. Cell phones without GPS are located by triangulation. Privacy "advocate"; "Oh my god anyone will be able to track me at any time". Not true, the regulations state who and when this information is made available. It has also created a huge industry in location based information inclusing such apps as "FriendFinder".
Tracking cell phones requires access to confidential information available only to the carriers and authorized people hence a reasonable assumption of privacy. A vehicle tag is available to anyone looking at it and therefore no reasonable assumption of privacy. See the difference?
The fact that vehicle tag information is collected in a database and sold does not change the fact that it is not confidential.
Sorry by carrying a cell phone does not place a tag on you butt with you name and address. Location information for a cell phone is not available to a person standing next to you but a car license number is available to anyone looking at the car.
Anything that can be legally done by a person can be legally done by a computer.
For example, when I walk into a small store the shop keeper may do the following; scan my face, match that face to my name, remember what I have purchased, greet me by name and suggest similar items and sale items. Just because some of those steps are done by machine does not bother me. Now if all that information was posted on the internet that would be a problem.
I have no assumption of privacy if I walk into a store that I have been to before; someone working there may, and hopefully will, recognize me (I like personalized service).
"Public record" as it applies to a municipality is is different from tag scanning. Am I wrong or can anyone, no matter what the reason, request and be given access to information on the public record? The need for a request is that the information must be gathered by a municipal employee and the reason for fees is to cover the cost of gathering the information. There are many cases in which public record information is put up on web sites and is available at no charge to anyone with an internet connection.
Another difference is that some "public record" information is contained on forms that are submitted to the city and the submitter may think that the city's confidentiality rules would apply to that information. This may constitute reasonable assumption of privacy. On the other hand the information that a vehicle with a certain tag is located and a certain place is plastered on the vehicle and available to anyone looking at that vehicle.
From a legal standpoint there is nothing wrong with this. The fact that a vehicle with a certain license number is at a certain location is public information and there is no reasonable assumption of privacy. Anyone walking down the street can gather this information. The use of vehicles and tag scanners just makes it faster. If they were logging license numbers of vehicles in locked garages, private property not visible from the street, etc then there would be an issue as there is an assumption of privacy and laws (B&E, trespassing, etc) would have to be broken to obtain the information.
This service just centralizes what is already done by the parking authority of every major city; ever watch "Parking Wars"? All it does is allows more organizations access to the same database of vehicle locations.
Who is able to obtain this information is a different story. Either by regulation or industry standard this information should only be given to organizations who have a legitimate need for it; repo, law enforcement, etc. It should not be given to every person who wants to track someone else. Stalking is a concern and should be addressed.
The use of public information and technology to catch deadbeats and lawbreakers is not a bad thing.
They are probably these.
While it's true that some portion of your customers are going to lie when they say there has been no water intrusion, including, at extra cost a device aimed at proving that your customer is lying on every device is unfair. Let alone close to the external extremedies of the device.
The cost for these detectors is pennies a phone.
Consumer devices need to be built to withstand the normal environments they will be used in. Surprise, people sometimes come into a warm building from the cold outside.
Quite simply; put the phone in a warmer spot like a pants pocket for a few minutes before going inside. Keep the phone in a purse for a few minutes so it can warm up gradually.
This is how the indicators work. Get them slightly damp by condensation enough time and they may indicate water. That is enough moisture to damage electronics. The Indicators are not failing; they are working as designed.
There are no contacts involved in this process. Look at this this. It is basically a compound that changes colour when exposed to enough water. No electricity involved.
This has been going on for years namely any time anyone tries to download content that the the US government considers military in nature including encryption software.
I doubt that at the end of that course everyone could create a 3D model of a building. Just because there may be simple and obvious aspects to something (drawing lines, measurements, etc) does not mean that the end product is simple and obvious. Chess for example, the rules and movement of each piece is simple and obvious but playing chess is not.
Sorry, I took drafting in high school. If drafting was "simple and obvious" there would be no need for classes, some at university level, to teach it. Are there two year college courses in alphabetization? There are in drafting.
Then music is not copyrightable because every song "relies on some basic principles" of mathematics an scoring.
Where does the word "creative" come in. I was talking about the article about "sweat of the brow". Since the average adult can alphabetize a list of names and phone numbers (the facts) it is not copyrighted under this ruling. Likewise, since the average person, even if given the list of data points (which are the facts), could not create a 3D model from them it is copyrightable under this ruling.
You missed a key point of the the rejection;
"The arrangement and presentation of a collection may be original, but not if it is "simple and obvious" such as a list in alphabetical or chronological order."
The arrangement of 3D data is neither "simple" nor "obvious" for the reasons I already stated. If you disagree ask an average adult to create a 3D model of a building.
Financial information in SEC filings and from stock tickers probably can be published and not copyrighted.
I would say yes if you live in Australia or the US; a date and time that two teams will play is a fact and under this ruling a fact or list of facts is not copyrightable.
A list of interesting names is not a fact in that it is formed by the creative selection of names by a person or group of people. In all probability no two lists created by different groups would be the same therefore there is creativity in the creation of the list.
One could publish something stating that a name was on the list because that is a fact but not just copy the whole list.
I disagree. The fact that the Washington monument 555 feet and 5 1/8 inches tall is not copyrightable but a 3-D model may be. The model must have some form of coordinate system. It must have some sort or relationship between the coordinates. It must have some indication of what is solid and what is not. This is much more than simple facts.
If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings. Think of how much it would cost to 3D model New York City.
Cleaning as in dirt, spills, erasable markers etc. You would not want to waste $3.30 just because of a little coffee. The website says they can be washed with water then dried before re-use. There are also documents that are confidential that should be erased before putting back into the sheet pile.
I keep having to do math to debunk so many reports. The page that uses .3 yen as the sheet cost does not take into account sheets that are not returned. They are calculating it as if it is a closed system where every sheet print will be returned in re-printable condition. Pages can be lost, damaged , written on, or stored and never returned. The true cost of using these sheets is as follows;
((purchase cost) + (replacement cost of non returned sheets))/cycle size
Replacement cost is the cost to replace each failed sheet (damaged or not returned) over the life of one page as follows;
(purchase cost * failure rate * cycle size)
Therefore with a purchase cost of 300yen, a failure rate of 10% (I am being generous) and a cycle of 1000 the cost per printing would be;
(300 +(300*.1*1000))/1000 = 30yen.
Even with the questionable power costs added that would be almost 4 times as expensive as plain paper.
Bump that up to a 30% failure and you get a cost of 91 yen/printing and 11x the cost of plain paper. To the "no shedding costs" comments; there is still a cost to erase the pages before they are returned to the printer for recycling.
They also do not factor the cost of collecting, sorting and cleaning the returned pages .
Another aspect not touched on is print speed. According to the specifications the printer takes 3 to 6 seconds per page to print. I am talking about the commercial printers not the desktop version. Yeah I am going to wait ten minutes to print 100 pages. That is very poor throughput.
You are suggesting giving a $3.30 piece of paper to a student and expecting them to do the following;
Not fold it;
Not staple it;
Not write on it and
return it to you.
If you get back 10% of the paper you hand out you will be lucky.