It sounds like they are looking to catch accidental leaks. I would like to know if they have examined their policies to reduce over-collection of unnecessary data. If they never collect it in the first place, then they never have to worry about losing control of it later on.
It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place. The same can be said for other industries.
On the bright side, its bringing jobs - not just McJobs either - back home. The rise of China - especially if they ever let the yuan float - may turn out to be the best thing to happen to the US in decades.
Whenever I hear stuff like that I point out the fact that my cash says... "For all debts public and private."
You don't have a debt until after service has been rendered. They won't give you service until after you have disclosed your information.
Then if that doesnt work I get loud, and they dont like that much, so they just do what I want.
Fantasyland. You get loud, they ask you to leave. If you don't leave, they call the cops and you are arrested for, at a minimum, trespassing since they already asked you to leave.
What would you propose for your example of security cameras scanning license plates?
I'd start off with the concept that there should be a principle of avoiding over-collection of personally identifiable information. That data from ANPR in public of cars without criminal suspicion should be limited to a day or two at most - and absolutely no integrating with other databases, its collected only for after the fact issues of crime and safety.
FWIW, I also think that a home-owner recording the license plate of everybody who parks in his driveway is significantly different from recording the comings and goings of all the cars in a place like a store's parking lot. If the public is invited in as is the case with a store's parking lot, they don't surrender all of their rights just on the say so of the property owner.
Neither. AOL separated into its own company again.
As a very casual observer it seems like the entire TW/AOL debacle could not have been mismanged worse - well I guess both companies could have gone titsup, but that's about it. TW vastly overpaid for AOL when AOL was at its peak (160 billion dollars). Then, just as AOL had started to climb out of the bottom they spun it off for a song ($2.5 billion). Since then AOL has been doing a decent enough job of reinventing itself as "new media" company - the kind of thing TW seems to be struggling with.
That's why corporate CEO's get the big bucks though!
FWIW, I'm willing to bet that the fact that they apply random drug testing to the entire workforce is out of some lawyer's simplistic view of non-discrimination and I bet it wouldn't hold up in court if someone who was not a heavy machinery operator was fired for testing positive. But I'm an optimist in that way and we are doomed to be disappointed.
Plus, illegal drug use isn't the only way to be impaired - lack of sleep, coming to work when they should have taken a sick day, being emotionally distraught over problems at home, etc (ever watch Breaking Bad? they had a perfect example of that with an air traffic controller). If the company cared about safety they would drop the drug testing and implement daily impairment testing for the machinery operators. Something along the lines of walking a straight line while touching their finger to their nose, but a little more complicated than just that. Such testing avoids the issue of moralism and focuses on empirical results - fail the impairment test and the stigma is a lot less than failing an illegal drug test so less incentive to try and cheat too.
How do you reconcile your privacy that with the freedom to record things in public places? At some point, you need to realize that when you are out in public, people can and will observe and record you. You might not like it, but what remedy do you take?
While I have some ideas on the issue, I think the most important point is to acknowledge that simple ideas like "no expectation of privacy in public" are from an age in which pervasive surveillance was not only impossible, but mostly unthinkable. Technology has advanced but the law has not kept up except in certain limited areas - like the recording of cellphone conversations - technically its legal to record any EM radiation passing through your property, after all its out in the public, but thanks to the electronic communication privacy act (ECPA) disclosure to a 3rd party is illegal. That's a start, but even that ECPA provision is from 1986 - technology and society has changed greatly since then too.
You can claim to have a right to privacy, but that does not mean that others are forbidden to watch you. You do not have a right to invisibility. At some point you have to accept that people you don't know will know things about you from watching you. Don't call up the privacy police to regulate an entity that uses voluntarily supplied information.
That's a complete side-step of the question. For one thing - it is no longer voluntarily supplied information when it is impossible to live a regular life without disclosing significant amounts of information. Nobody sane can think that will make for a healthy society, which is why I think you avoided answering that question.
Remember, this whole discussion was about businesses scraping blogs and social sites, NOT about the forced extraction of information. You're getting off to a different (but related) topic.
Another side-step. The point here is to take the belief that underlies your rationalization in one area and apply the same rationalization to another area and see if it still makes sense. I think you see that it does not make sense, which means the initial premise is flawed or at least overly simplified.
I for one identified early on that Facebook and similar sites appeal to a form of vanity I do not personally possess. Even if I did find that tempting, vanity is not a rational reason to participate in something.
Perhaps the reason you caught flak was really for such a snooty attitude.
While narcissism may be a motivator for some users of facebook, it can hardly be said that vanity is the draw. The ability to easily connect (and reconnect) with friends present and past is quite valuable to most regular people. The price may be too high and too hidden, but that doesn't make the value provided any less meaningless.
What about say, a store, quietly installing a system to read and record the license plate of every car that enters their parking lot?
That is their parking lot and a public place, where I have no expectation of privacy. Why should they be banned from this behavior? Consider the flip side. Am I allowed to put up a camera on my property that photographs everyone that comes to my door?
And when the practice gets to the point where it is impossible to even purchase basic necessities without having your presence logged, you are fine with that? When it ultimately becomes a choice between the life of a shut in and having your every movement beyond your own property permanently logged how can that make for a healthy society?
Bogus name and address solves this problem. You're not doing this under oath, and as long as you are paying the entire bill before you leave, there is no fraud.
I figured you would come down to that argument - that's why I threw it in there. I say it is entirely bogus that one needs to lie in order to transact basic commerce and that a society which accepts that suffering from a massive breakdown in trust, and without trust no one can do business, healthcare or otherwise.
Maybe in general, but their "birds eye view" perspective in their mapping section kicks google's ass. I think google is trying to catch up, but it was too buggy to even work when I tried what sounded like the google equivalent.
Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked.
Does that mean MS has privileged access to facebook data? As in if your facebook 'friends' only disclose that information to 'friends' and not the entire world MS can still see it in order to catalog it (and do who knows what else with it)?
If you don't want them to do something nefarious with your info, don't give it to them. There is no need for some government entity to impose rules to protect you.
Where do you draw the line?
When facebook retro-actively changes what they promise to do and not do with the information people give them? What about say, a store, quietly installing a system to read and record the license plate of every car that enters their parking lot? Or when an entire industry becomes so used to routine privacy violations that even walk-in medical clinics refuse service to cash-only patients who won't disclose their name, address, etc?
The real answer is requiring companies to ask permission and bar them from trying to compel people to give them the permission. It's one thing to require a drug test and background check for a job, but it's quite another to include in that background check data scraping off the net.
And BTW, pre-employment drug tests are bullshit 999 out of a thousand - they are the result of the intersection between moralists and insurance liability since actual continued testing to maintain employment is illegal except in the most limited of safety-critical situations - might as well test for STDs for all the good it does.
Then the non-technical users swtich, get frustrated (because they *think* they're going to be frustrated), and the cost savings disappear.
Awful big assumption there. The reason to give them half the savings is because they currently have no skin in the game. As it is now, there is no value to them for the effort of learning something new. But there is value to the company for them to learn the new software. So you got a choice - carrot of a splitting the savings, stick of threatening to fire them or do nothing and let it meander along as currently described with the worst of both worlds.
The right answer here is interoperability. The concept that you need a specific Office suite to open a document is just insane - much like requiring a specific browser to view a website.
Not within a single company it's not. Two office apps means double the effort for support and half the expertise among the users.
To bastardize an old saying, police work is like making sausage and passing laws, someone needs to keep an eye on it to make sure it's not going astray but I sure don't want to see how it all works.
Fourth of all, why are the *police* part of this "whining women" bunch? Support that statement
Because they are stunt-posting these calls to twitter. If they gave a damn about the goals for a police force - not just doing their jobs as they define them - they would make all this information easily accessible all of the time. But, since that sort of disclosure would likely hold them to higher public accountability, they are only doing it for a single day.
They're going to bust you for destruction of federal property. You can argue that it was put on your car on your property, but I wouldn't expect to get very far.
The lesson here is do not post to the internet about the issue until you've fully taken it apart and documented it. Then post anonymously via an internet cafe or an unsecured wifi access point. But please do make the effort so that the rest of us can find out as much about it as possible.
are they just glorified cellphones or something more?
Seems to be the case - someone looked up the FCC ID on the device in the picture and found it owned by a lesser-known cell phone equipment manufacturer. No idea how frequently it phones home with status updates.
We need this built into our televisions to automagically remove those network logo "bugs" and other crap they have started putting on the screen during the shows.
You just can't make an allegation like that without presenting a citation or link to a list of copiers known to behave in such a manner.
Sorry, its been nearly a decade since I read a couple of reports / confirmations from some people who claimed to have seen it happen at kinkos or a similar place. It was probably on risks digest, but I'm not totally sure.
I did find one report that Ikon copiers log the attempts and their service techs are required to report it back to Ikon (who presumably reports it to the secret service) as part of routine service calls - but apparently that doesn't shut down the copier, just incriminates the owner.
They already do this for money. It's called the EURion constellation.
Many copiers are known to shutdown permanently - as in require a visit from the repairman (who will probably report you to the secret service or equivalent anti-money-counterfeiting police in your country) - when presented with that pattern.
It's just begging for mischief makers to abuse by putting the pattern on all sorts of regular documents.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike Conflict Diamonds, it's really hard to trace where the Conflict Rare Earths come from.
Blood diamonds may not be all they are cracked up to be.
Besides, the conditions under which many "conflict-free" diamonds are mined ought to be enough to take the lustre off the stone too.
It sounds like they are looking to catch accidental leaks.
I would like to know if they have examined their policies to reduce over-collection of unnecessary data.
If they never collect it in the first place, then they never have to worry about losing control of it later on.
Why haven't the mobile networks in the EU exploded yet, then, eh?
Clearly it is due to European socialism. Real capitalism explodes!
It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place. The same can be said for other industries.
On the bright side, its bringing jobs - not just McJobs either - back home. The rise of China - especially if they ever let the yuan float - may turn out to be the best thing to happen to the US in decades.
Whenever I hear stuff like that I point out the fact that my cash says... "For all debts public and private."
You don't have a debt until after service has been rendered. They won't give you service until after you have disclosed your information.
Then if that doesnt work I get loud, and they dont like that much, so they just do what I want.
Fantasyland. You get loud, they ask you to leave. If you don't leave, they call the cops and you are arrested for, at a minimum, trespassing since they already asked you to leave.
What would you propose for your example of security cameras scanning license plates?
I'd start off with the concept that there should be a principle of avoiding over-collection of personally identifiable information. That data from ANPR in public of cars without criminal suspicion should be limited to a day or two at most - and absolutely no integrating with other databases, its collected only for after the fact issues of crime and safety.
FWIW, I also think that a home-owner recording the license plate of everybody who parks in his driveway is significantly different from recording the comings and goings of all the cars in a place like a store's parking lot. If the public is invited in as is the case with a store's parking lot, they don't surrender all of their rights just on the say so of the property owner.
Neither. AOL separated into its own company again.
As a very casual observer it seems like the entire TW/AOL debacle could not have been mismanged worse - well I guess both companies could have gone titsup, but that's about it. TW vastly overpaid for AOL when AOL was at its peak (160 billion dollars). Then, just as AOL had started to climb out of the bottom they spun it off for a song ($2.5 billion). Since then AOL has been doing a decent enough job of reinventing itself as "new media" company - the kind of thing TW seems to be struggling with.
That's why corporate CEO's get the big bucks though!
FWIW, I'm willing to bet that the fact that they apply random drug testing to the entire workforce is out of some lawyer's simplistic view of non-discrimination and I bet it wouldn't hold up in court if someone who was not a heavy machinery operator was fired for testing positive. But I'm an optimist in that way and we are doomed to be disappointed.
Plus, illegal drug use isn't the only way to be impaired - lack of sleep, coming to work when they should have taken a sick day, being emotionally distraught over problems at home, etc (ever watch Breaking Bad? they had a perfect example of that with an air traffic controller). If the company cared about safety they would drop the drug testing and implement daily impairment testing for the machinery operators. Something along the lines of walking a straight line while touching their finger to their nose, but a little more complicated than just that. Such testing avoids the issue of moralism and focuses on empirical results - fail the impairment test and the stigma is a lot less than failing an illegal drug test so less incentive to try and cheat too.
How do you reconcile your privacy that with the freedom to record things in public places? At some point, you need to realize that when you are out in public, people can and will observe and record you. You might not like it, but what remedy do you take?
While I have some ideas on the issue, I think the most important point is to acknowledge that simple ideas like "no expectation of privacy in public" are from an age in which pervasive surveillance was not only impossible, but mostly unthinkable. Technology has advanced but the law has not kept up except in certain limited areas - like the recording of cellphone conversations - technically its legal to record any EM radiation passing through your property, after all its out in the public, but thanks to the electronic communication privacy act (ECPA) disclosure to a 3rd party is illegal. That's a start, but even that ECPA provision is from 1986 - technology and society has changed greatly since then too.
You can claim to have a right to privacy, but that does not mean that others are forbidden to watch you. You do not have a right to invisibility. At some point you have to accept that people you don't know will know things about you from watching you. Don't call up the privacy police to regulate an entity that uses voluntarily supplied information.
That's a complete side-step of the question. For one thing - it is no longer voluntarily supplied information when it is impossible to live a regular life without disclosing significant amounts of information. Nobody sane can think that will make for a healthy society, which is why I think you avoided answering that question.
Remember, this whole discussion was about businesses scraping blogs and social sites, NOT about the forced extraction of information. You're getting off to a different (but related) topic.
Another side-step. The point here is to take the belief that underlies your rationalization in one area and apply the same rationalization to another area and see if it still makes sense. I think you see that it does not make sense, which means the initial premise is flawed or at least overly simplified.
I for one identified early on that Facebook and similar sites appeal to a form of vanity I do not personally possess.
Even if I did find that tempting, vanity is not a rational reason to participate in something.
Perhaps the reason you caught flak was really for such a snooty attitude.
While narcissism may be a motivator for some users of facebook, it can hardly be said that vanity is the draw.
The ability to easily connect (and reconnect) with friends present and past is quite valuable to most regular people.
The price may be too high and too hidden, but that doesn't make the value provided any less meaningless.
What about say, a store, quietly installing a system to read and record the license plate of every car that enters their parking lot?
That is their parking lot and a public place, where I have no expectation of privacy. Why should they be banned from this behavior? Consider the flip side. Am I allowed to put up a camera on my property that photographs everyone that comes to my door?
And when the practice gets to the point where it is impossible to even purchase basic necessities without having your presence logged, you are fine with that? When it ultimately becomes a choice between the life of a shut in and having your every movement beyond your own property permanently logged how can that make for a healthy society?
Bogus name and address solves this problem. You're not doing this under oath, and as long as you are paying the entire bill before you leave, there is no fraud.
I figured you would come down to that argument - that's why I threw it in there. I say it is entirely bogus that one needs to lie in order to transact basic commerce and that a society which accepts that suffering from a massive breakdown in trust, and without trust no one can do business, healthcare or otherwise.
Bing is utter crap.
Maybe in general, but their "birds eye view" perspective in their mapping section kicks google's ass. I think google is trying to catch up, but it was too buggy to even work when I tried what sounded like the google equivalent.
Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked.
Does that mean MS has privileged access to facebook data? As in if your facebook 'friends' only disclose that information to 'friends' and not the entire world MS can still see it in order to catalog it (and do who knows what else with it)?
If you don't want them to do something nefarious with your info, don't give it to them. There is no need for some government entity to impose rules to protect you.
Where do you draw the line?
When facebook retro-actively changes what they promise to do and not do with the information people give them?
What about say, a store, quietly installing a system to read and record the license plate of every car that enters their parking lot?
Or when an entire industry becomes so used to routine privacy violations that even walk-in medical clinics refuse service to cash-only patients who won't disclose their name, address, etc?
The real answer is requiring companies to ask permission and bar them from trying to compel people to give them the permission. It's one thing to require a drug test and background check for a job, but it's quite another to include in that background check data scraping off the net.
It's called the rigth to informational self-determinism
And BTW, pre-employment drug tests are bullshit 999 out of a thousand - they are the result of the intersection between moralists and insurance liability since actual continued testing to maintain employment is illegal except in the most limited of safety-critical situations - might as well test for STDs for all the good it does.
Then the non-technical users swtich, get frustrated (because they *think* they're going to be frustrated), and the cost savings disappear.
Awful big assumption there. The reason to give them half the savings is because they currently have no skin in the game. As it is now, there is no value to them for the effort of learning something new. But there is value to the company for them to learn the new software. So you got a choice - carrot of a splitting the savings, stick of threatening to fire them or do nothing and let it meander along as currently described with the worst of both worlds.
The right answer here is interoperability. The concept that you need a specific Office suite to open a document is just insane - much like requiring a specific browser to view a website.
Not within a single company it's not. Two office apps means double the effort for support and half the expertise among the users.
Give the OO users half the cash from the cost savings of the software license and then see how many people think MS Office is superior.
If I had a choice
False dichotomy.
To bastardize an old saying, police work is like making sausage and passing laws, someone needs to keep an eye on it to make sure it's not going astray but I sure don't want to see how it all works.
Naive recipe for abuse.
Fourth of all, why are the *police* part of this "whining women" bunch? Support that statement
Because they are stunt-posting these calls to twitter. If they gave a damn about the goals for a police force - not just doing their jobs as they define them - they would make all this information easily accessible all of the time. But, since that sort of disclosure would likely hold them to higher public accountability, they are only doing it for a single day.
They're going to bust you for destruction of federal property. You can argue that it was put on your car on your property, but I wouldn't expect to get very far.
The lesson here is do not post to the internet about the issue until you've fully taken it apart and documented it.
Then post anonymously via an internet cafe or an unsecured wifi access point.
But please do make the effort so that the rest of us can find out as much about it as possible.
are they just glorified cellphones or something more?
Seems to be the case - someone looked up the FCC ID on the device in the picture and found it owned by a lesser-known cell phone equipment manufacturer.
No idea how frequently it phones home with status updates.
We need this built into our televisions to automagically remove those network logo "bugs" and other crap they have started putting on the screen during the shows.
You just can't make an allegation like that without presenting a citation or link to a list of copiers known to behave in such a manner.
Sorry, its been nearly a decade since I read a couple of reports / confirmations from some people who claimed to have seen it happen at kinkos or a similar place.
It was probably on risks digest, but I'm not totally sure.
I did find one report that Ikon copiers log the attempts and their service techs are required to report it back to Ikon (who presumably reports it to the secret service) as part of routine service calls - but apparently that doesn't shut down the copier, just incriminates the owner.
They already do this for money. It's called the EURion constellation.
Many copiers are known to shutdown permanently - as in require a visit from the repairman (who will probably report you to the secret service or equivalent anti-money-counterfeiting police in your country) - when presented with that pattern.
It's just begging for mischief makers to abuse by putting the pattern on all sorts of regular documents.