Generally, a business, such as a repo company, can retain your information during the period in which you're doing business with them. If I were to consent to being scanned, then they could keep the scan only so long as it takes to see if I'm on the list of cars to be repossessed.
Since I haven't consented to the collection of "personal information" ("personally identifying information" in the US), and that information is a regulated government-issued identifier, then there's a case to be made that the repo company variously
* isn't entitled to the information
* requires a licence to use it under controlled circumstances
* is entitled only to compare it to a list. or
* is entitled to retain it only until it has been compared.
Similar logic applies to facial recognition: the right to photograph is stronger, but the right to retain is weaker.
Andy writes, at The technical aspects of privacy,
"The first of three public workshops kicked off a conversation with the federal government on data privacy in the US... hearing news all the time about new technical assaults on individual autonomy, I found the circumscribed scope of the conference disappointing. "
There is a stolen IMEI list, but it's not used much, possibly for this very reason. Car thieves have to forge a VIN, why shouldn't phone thieves have to forge an IMEI?
That was anonymous, who didn't check their work. The armchair detectives published their claims with their evidence for others to critique. That often works better, especially when one is as mad as hell (:-))
My understanding is that is not the case, at least in the U.S., in part because the number of reported false assertions is huge. To be fair, of course, the programmer is a human, and responsible (:-))
The Gox Crater: Crowd Detectives Reveal Billion-Dollar Heist As Inside Job
Thousands of volunteering and self-organizing detectives have been meticulously laying a puzzle that reveals the Gox billion-dollar heist as an inside job. As smoke clears on the implosion of the Empty Gox bitcoin exchange, thousands of people in the community committed to revealing the truth behind the stonewalling exchange. What was claimed first to be a technical problem, then an outside theft, has been conclusively determined that the MtGox management knew too much, too long ago, to have this be an ordinary case of theft.
Conversely, when you're older than 40, you may want the more challenging job if the old one is stultifying.
I'm over 60, and have gone from management to volunteer because my company's then major customer was exceedingly political and more than a little broken. So I took three months off and worked pro bono for a group that was a lot like a start-up: no money, tons of pressure, borrowed office space and the only thing free was the coffee. Totally fun!
That gave me the energy to go back refreshed, to a senior individual-contributor job at a young company.
When that happens, one side is making a windfall profit, and the other side "negotiate" wit them until they get a deal they can live with. To date, negotiation has tended to start with screaming arguments and run up to service cutoffs, but no-one's stabbed anyone yet (;-))
Paying the godfather for "protection" is often necessary, but one doesn't often announce it publicly, or sign a contract that can be produce in court later (;-))
The library community has been sensitive to this for a long while, and the library software vendors (eg, GEAC and friends) are careful to keep data for a short a period as possible, meeting the requirements of the most privacy-protective countries they sell into. As few countries either have or enforce library anti-privacy laws, the software is therefor saleable everywhere.
Almost ironically, privacy-protective code can be a business advantage.
They're needed until the customer has paid their bill, and then should be deleted, just like library records of who borrowed what book are deleted when it's returned. Anyone keeping them longer is looking to make themselves a target for break-ins, subversion or court orders.
Telcos are often mandated to keep them, in the kind of "future crime" scenario that belongs in a movie like Minority Report (:-))
Speculative invoicing is a British term, describing the behaviour of law firms who have since been disbarred for a specific form of copyright trolling. The troll knows that, and freaked out at a seemingly innocuous term.
I depend critically on copyright to protect my book income, and am a good-faith plaintiff (via my publisher), but we do not have a credible reason to go after people who download individual copies. In fact, we make copies of "Using Samba (O'Reilly) available with every copy of the samba program.
The people I worry about are professional crooks, who print pallet-loads of the book and sell them cheap. Ditto unauthorized translators, because I don't get royalties for massive quantities of books. Historically, publishers like mine have been able to use the courts in their traditional form and file individual suits to stop unauthorized printings.
To get value from grandma (assuming she's a sysadmin grandma) we make the book available on-line, as part of a subscription service. This allows us to benefit from her just wanting to refer to it for a few days, or wanting to print out the section from Chapter 3 on setting up XP. She knows she can find it in the samba download, but it's easier to spend a few dollars and save the time. Just like it's worth the price of a professionally-printed book that she can make notes in, put yelow stickes on and read in the bathtub.
Class actions are a relatively new development, and were originally permitted so as to allow large numbers of individual plaintiffs to band together to sue a single malefactor. Allowing a single plaintiff to sue very large numbers of possible malefactors is unusual. The courts are suspicious of it, and wonder if it is legitimate to sue more than one grandma for $8,000, or even $100, for a blue-ray that costs $8.00 Canadian on Amazon (down from $20.99)
The balance between an honest plaintiff and one engaging in "speculative invoicing" is the subject of learned debate amoung the legal profession in Canada: for a non-learned discussion, see http://www.slaw.ca/2013/01/16/... I had the honour of editing this GTALUG submission to the larger debate.
So, to answer your question, I'm not comfortable asking Grandma for any money after the fact. I want her to go to Amazon, pay $8.00 up front and stream a legitimate copy of the movie. If I find a publisher making it available for $2.00 who isn't paying me royalties, I'll sue them.
The case management judge will make sure the suit goes the way the law allows, without the opportunity to extort settlements. The does will have the chance to defend themselves, and the troll will have to spend cubic yards of money to make a case, or give up and go home.
I expect one attempt to proceed to see if they can frighten someone into pleading guilty, but if the does band together, a roughly 0% chance of success for the troll, whether or not any individual doe is arguably guilty.
"there is some evidence that Voltage has been engaged in litigation which may have an improper purposes".
And he assigned a case management judge to supervise in concert with the interveners. Polite, Canadian, and organized so that an honest suit would go forwards, but a troll would find themselves caught between making a loss or committing contempt of court.
If one of the very-short-ranged devices like a wristwatch can be handed the task of keeping your temporary key, then go for it. A crook has to cut it or your hand off, or a court has to write a order to let the police at it. That's reasonabley secure, at least as good as a door-key on a keyring. The magic words are "short ranged".
I was curious and asked the linux bios folks, who noted that they made sure they could checksum their eproms, and that the chromebooks had hardware that made it easy. It's harder on very constrained devices like phones.
I understand you're pissed at comcast, but I think you're reading way more into what I said than what I said.
I was describing why all ISPs care about their upstream costs, to contribute to the discussion started by Bill, not suggesting that a crook was a good guy.
Sorry, I should have said that it worked back when Sun and Kodak were doing it with Ultra 30s. I blithely assumed people knew about movie delivery, which seems to be wrong!
These days many theatres receive their "films" over the net, and there is a whole new business in delivering pay-to-watch movies to hotels. The latter mostly uses leased lines, some ATM, mostly IP with static provisioning.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally, a business, such as a repo company, can retain your information during the period in which you're doing business with them. If I were to consent to being scanned, then they could keep the scan only so long as it takes to see if I'm on the list of cars to be repossessed.
Since I haven't consented to the collection of "personal information" ("personally identifying information" in the US), and that information is a regulated government-issued identifier, then there's a case to be made that the repo company variously
Similar logic applies to facial recognition: the right to photograph is stronger, but the right to retain is weaker.
Andy writes, at The technical aspects of privacy, "The first of three public workshops kicked off a conversation with the federal government on data privacy in the US... hearing news all the time about new technical assaults on individual autonomy, I found the circumscribed scope of the conference disappointing. "
There is a stolen IMEI list, but it's not used much, possibly for this very reason. Car thieves have to forge a VIN, why shouldn't phone thieves have to forge an IMEI?
--dave
They need a motivation to honour a customer's request to be placed on the list. Right now, they're in a conflict of interest.
That was anonymous, who didn't check their work. The armchair detectives published their claims with their evidence for others to critique. That often works better, especially when one is as mad as hell (:-))
My understanding is that is not the case, at least in the U.S., in part because the number of reported false assertions is huge. To be fair, of course, the programmer is a human, and responsible (:-))
The Gox Crater: Crowd Detectives Reveal Billion-Dollar Heist As Inside Job
Thousands of volunteering and self-organizing detectives have been meticulously laying a puzzle that reveals the Gox billion-dollar heist as an inside job. As smoke clears on the implosion of the Empty Gox bitcoin exchange, thousands of people in the community committed to revealing the truth behind the stonewalling exchange. What was claimed first to be a technical problem, then an outside theft, has been conclusively determined that the MtGox management knew too much, too long ago, to have this be an ordinary case of theft.
I suspect he was hollering at the program that did the takedown notice without human involvement (;-))
Conversely, when you're older than 40, you may want the more challenging job if the old one is stultifying.
I'm over 60, and have gone from management to volunteer because my company's then major customer was exceedingly political and more than a little broken. So I took three months off and worked pro bono for a group that was a lot like a start-up: no money, tons of pressure, borrowed office space and the only thing free was the coffee. Totally fun!
That gave me the energy to go back refreshed, to a senior individual-contributor job at a young company.
When that happens, one side is making a windfall profit, and the other side "negotiate" wit them until they get a deal they can live with. To date, negotiation has tended to start with screaming arguments and run up to service cutoffs, but no-one's stabbed anyone yet (;-))
Paying the godfather for "protection" is often necessary, but one doesn't often announce it publicly, or sign a contract that can be produce in court later (;-))
The library community has been sensitive to this for a long while, and the library software vendors (eg, GEAC and friends) are careful to keep data for a short a period as possible, meeting the requirements of the most privacy-protective countries they sell into. As few countries either have or enforce library anti-privacy laws, the software is therefor saleable everywhere.
Almost ironically, privacy-protective code can be a business advantage.
They're needed until the customer has paid their bill, and then should be deleted, just like library records of who borrowed what book are deleted when it's returned. Anyone keeping them longer is looking to make themselves a target for break-ins, subversion or court orders.
Telcos are often mandated to keep them, in the kind of "future crime" scenario that belongs in a movie like Minority Report (:-))
For other readers, this AC is a troll.
Speculative invoicing is a British term, describing the behaviour of law firms who have since been disbarred for a specific form of copyright trolling. The troll knows that, and freaked out at a seemingly innocuous term.
Draw your own conclusions.
--dave
I depend critically on copyright to protect my book income, and am a good-faith plaintiff (via my publisher), but we do not have a credible reason to go after people who download individual copies. In fact, we make copies of "Using Samba (O'Reilly) available with every copy of the samba program.
The people I worry about are professional crooks, who print pallet-loads of the book and sell them cheap. Ditto unauthorized translators, because I don't get royalties for massive quantities of books. Historically, publishers like mine have been able to use the courts in their traditional form and file individual suits to stop unauthorized printings.
To get value from grandma (assuming she's a sysadmin grandma) we make the book available on-line, as part of a subscription service. This allows us to benefit from her just wanting to refer to it for a few days, or wanting to print out the section from Chapter 3 on setting up XP. She knows she can find it in the samba download, but it's easier to spend a few dollars and save the time. Just like it's worth the price of a professionally-printed book that she can make notes in, put yelow stickes on and read in the bathtub.
Class actions are a relatively new development, and were originally permitted so as to allow large numbers of individual plaintiffs to band together to sue a single malefactor. Allowing a single plaintiff to sue very large numbers of possible malefactors is unusual. The courts are suspicious of it, and wonder if it is legitimate to sue more than one grandma for $8,000, or even $100, for a blue-ray that costs $8.00 Canadian on Amazon (down from $20.99)
The balance between an honest plaintiff and one engaging in "speculative invoicing" is the subject of learned debate amoung the legal profession in Canada: for a non-learned discussion, see http://www.slaw.ca/2013/01/16/... I had the honour of editing this GTALUG submission to the larger debate.
So, to answer your question, I'm not comfortable asking Grandma for any money after the fact. I want her to go to Amazon, pay $8.00 up front and stream a legitimate copy of the movie. If I find a publisher making it available for $2.00 who isn't paying me royalties, I'll sue them.
They're a "production company", a hired hand. They don't finance pictures.
The order is better written than the summary. Them there Canajan Judges speak good English (or American (:-))
The case management judge will make sure the suit goes the way the law allows, without the opportunity to extort settlements. The does will have the chance to defend themselves, and the troll will have to spend cubic yards of money to make a case, or give up and go home.
I expect one attempt to proceed to see if they can frighten someone into pleading guilty, but if the does band together, a roughly 0% chance of success for the troll, whether or not any individual doe is arguably guilty.
--dave
A nerd, not a lawyer
"there is some evidence that Voltage has been engaged in litigation which may have an improper purposes".
And he assigned a case management judge to supervise in concert with the interveners. Polite, Canadian, and organized so that an honest suit would go forwards, but a troll would find themselves caught between making a loss or committing contempt of court.
If one of the very-short-ranged devices like a wristwatch can be handed the task of keeping your temporary key, then go for it. A crook has to cut it or your hand off, or a court has to write a order to let the police at it. That's reasonabley secure, at least as good as a door-key on a keyring. The magic words are "short ranged".
I was curious and asked the linux bios folks, who noted that they made sure they could checksum their eproms, and that the chromebooks had hardware that made it easy. It's harder on very constrained devices like phones.
Traditionally, spies did their job at their own risk. If they were discovered, well, smiert spionam!
I understand you're pissed at comcast, but I think you're reading way more into what I said than what I said.
I was describing why all ISPs care about their upstream costs, to contribute to the discussion started by Bill, not suggesting that a crook was a good guy.
Sorry, I should have said that it worked back when Sun and Kodak were doing it with Ultra 30s. I blithely assumed people knew about movie delivery, which seems to be wrong!
These days many theatres receive their "films" over the net, and there is a whole new business in delivering pay-to-watch movies to hotels. The latter mostly uses leased lines, some ATM, mostly IP with static provisioning.
More like ftp and telnet, then someone realized ftp was the equivalent of email, and from then on, all bets were off!