If the app is connected to a clinical information system, or is used to control medical devices, then the app should be subjected to the same controls that those systems or devices are subject to. The reasoning for this should be self evident. A heart-lung machine in an operating theatre needs to pass some pretty rigourous standards, and that should include any device or software that will feed it information or control.
If it's just a tool for the doc to use him or herself, or the patient to use him or herself, then buyer beware.
Your paranoia is appropriate in inverse proportion to the ability you have to control what information about you is collected, and how it is used. Unfortunately, the mavens of on-line data aggregation want to control and sell that information about you. The symptom is privacy paranoia, but the problem is that you have been turned into the raw material from which valuable data can be mined.
While some children do wander away, the real fear that this device appears to cater to is stranger abduction. The problem is that stranger abduction is rare. Abuse by family members or close family friends is much more common, and often does not involve the child being abducted or going missing. This technology would seem to be tailor made to enable abusers to track and control the children that they are already controlling and manipulating.
There are a number of things fundamentally wrong here:
1. As has been pointed out in the replies and elsewhere, actual terrorists and nut-bars are exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, as to disappear in the white noise of normal individual variation. In other words, the false positives will be too high.
2. This is tantamount, in my view, to searching for thought crime. It is the approach of a police state dealing with a suspect population and asserting preemptive control, rather than that of a democratic state dealing with suspect individuals after a crime has occurred.
3. This is a resource sink. The dollars and people that this will soak up will divert dollars and resources from reasonable preventive and investigatory efforts that are much more likely to actually improve security.
To sum up, this is operationally weak, ethically wrong headed, and will not pass a cost-benefit analysis. That pretty much guarantees major funding from the security bureaucracy.
I considering Americanizing the spelling, but figured you could handle the translation relatively easily.
But you are right in a larger sense as well. There is no safe harbour. What with only sectoral privacy protection, and Patriot Act provisions for data snooping, both Europeans and Canadians have more than a little scepticism about the protection of personal information in the U.S.
That's why both the E.U. and the Canadian privacy regulations have rules about transferring personally identifiable information across borders.
That's why there is "Safe Harbour" legislation in the U.S. - to allow U.S. corporations to qualify as privacy compliant organizations.
The fact is that where the U.S. does provide privacy protection (such as in the specific law about video rentals) those laws have teeth and tend to be enforced. The problem is that this is a sectoral approach. You can't protect privacy partially.
Slashdot Mirror
If the app is connected to a clinical information system, or is used to control medical devices, then the app should be subjected to the same controls that those systems or devices are subject to. The reasoning for this should be self evident. A heart-lung machine in an operating theatre needs to pass some pretty rigourous standards, and that should include any device or software that will feed it information or control.
If it's just a tool for the doc to use him or herself, or the patient to use him or herself, then buyer beware.
Your paranoia is appropriate in inverse proportion to the ability you have to control what information about you is collected, and how it is used. Unfortunately, the mavens of on-line data aggregation want to control and sell that information about you. The symptom is privacy paranoia, but the problem is that you have been turned into the raw material from which valuable data can be mined.
While some children do wander away, the real fear that this device appears to cater to is stranger abduction. The problem is that stranger abduction is rare. Abuse by family members or close family friends is much more common, and often does not involve the child being abducted or going missing. This technology would seem to be tailor made to enable abusers to track and control the children that they are already controlling and manipulating.
There are a number of things fundamentally wrong here:
1. As has been pointed out in the replies and elsewhere, actual terrorists and nut-bars are exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, as to disappear in the white noise of normal individual variation. In other words, the false positives will be too high.
2. This is tantamount, in my view, to searching for thought crime. It is the approach of a police state dealing with a suspect population and asserting preemptive control, rather than that of a democratic state dealing with suspect individuals after a crime has occurred.
3. This is a resource sink. The dollars and people that this will soak up will divert dollars and resources from reasonable preventive and investigatory efforts that are much more likely to actually improve security.
To sum up, this is operationally weak, ethically wrong headed, and will not pass a cost-benefit analysis. That pretty much guarantees major funding from the security bureaucracy.
I considering Americanizing the spelling, but figured you could handle the translation relatively easily.
But you are right in a larger sense as well. There is no safe harbour. What with only sectoral privacy protection, and Patriot Act provisions for data snooping, both Europeans and Canadians have more than a little scepticism about the protection of personal information in the U.S.
That's why both the E.U. and the Canadian privacy regulations have rules about transferring personally identifiable information across borders.
That's why there is "Safe Harbour" legislation in the U.S. - to allow U.S. corporations to qualify as privacy compliant organizations.
The fact is that where the U.S. does provide privacy protection (such as in the specific law about video rentals) those laws have teeth and tend to be enforced. The problem is that this is a sectoral approach. You can't protect privacy partially.