Tom Keenan both amused and scared me at the GTEC conference in Ottawa recently.
Keenan, a professor at the University of Calgary, as well as a writer and broadcaster, gave a presentation called “Where Were You on Saturday Night? How ‘reality mining’ and other emerging technologies will change your life and your job.”
In it, he described how it was possible to find out from public online records where former WestJet CEO Clive Beddoes lives, the assessed value of his home and even where his daughter is going to university.
He showed a list of the last meals of condemned prisoners posted on the Internet by authorities in Texas (since removed thanks to a public outcry) and personal information on a young offender – including a photo – posted on the Web by county officials in Florida.
And he described the controversy over name badges with built-in radio frequency identification tags at a high-level conference in Geneva, where organizers called a press conference to deny rumours the tags were being used to monitor who talked to whom in the halls – but admitted the technology was capable of monitoring delegates’ movements.
Keenan also showed a picture – appropriately edited for a G-rated presentation – of the unfortunate young man whose angry ex-girlfriend used her key to his apartment, a digital camera and a good guess at when he’d be in the shower to post his nude photo on the Internet.
With a good deal of humour, he was making the point that the Internet and other technologies like RFID, make it very easy to invade privacy – or, for that matter, to compromise your own privacy, as so many kids do when they post photos on Facebook that they would never think of showing their parents.
I’ve also recently been reading Spychips, a book about the privacy threats that come with RFID. The book’s tone is a bit shrill, and some of the authors’ fears seem a little farfetched, but anyone who deals with RFID or cares about privacy should read it.
Spychips made me question my comfortable assumption that it makes no sense to track people with RFID because of its short range. The authors point out that even with short-range tags it’s practical to track movement past a few predefined points – like in and out of a certain area.
And a little experiment proved something else. If you ask whether RFID is a threat to privacy, you’ll hear that it isn’t because of its short range. But try asking someone who’s selling RFID technology for tracking workers’ movements in a restricted area – for safety purposes – how many readers it will take to cover that area, and you’ll hear a different story about range. RFID tags come in several flavours with ranges from millimeters to multiple meters.
I’m not an anti-technology guy. I’ve made my living writing about this stuff most of my life, and I use quite a bit of it to my advantage every day. But you can’t be blind to the risks. The table saw in my home workshop is a very useful technology too – but I always remember that it’s capable of removing fingers very quickly and quite painfully if I’m not paying attention. It’s wise to take the same attitude to technology and privacy as to spinning blades and fingers.
