If government officials are using personal mail on public mail servers from the network at the State Dept they also have some serious security issues. Most corporate security policies prohibit that behavior for good reason, even if they don't enforce it. It generally bypasses your email antivirus protection.
It's still quite a bit different from fingerprints. You can be smart and wipe down the soda can the cops gave you during an interview rather than throwing it away and allowing them to collect it. Good luck getting your DNA off of it. It's much harder to control where you leave sweat or a stray hair if you spend 24 hours in holding. Can they just pull it off the clothes they took off you when they processed you in, despite the fact you had no choice about turning them over? Either we have the right to refuse and force them to obtain a warrant or we don't. This ability to side step demonstrating probable cause is completely toxic to the legal system. I'm truly disappointed the supreme court didn't hear the case. Pulling sweat off a chair after a suspect refuses DNA collection is a pretty good definition of overstepping their ability to compel DNA collection without a warrant. I guess if the cops want to talk to me I'll have to show up in a bunny suit like I'm going into a clean room and not drink from any container. Better make sure you don't get beat up in holding, they might just collect your blood off the floor. This is going to lead to too many cases where someone gets charged or convicted who was, at some point present at the crime scene or associated with the victim, but did not have any part in the crime.
I was wrong about the IR filters on digital cameras, as another poster mentioned, a remote control IR emitter shows up bright as day on my camera. I'm confused by the result as I understand digital cameras do filter IR so the sky doesn't look purple, etc.. but oddly the IR emitted from an IR LED shows up as bright as any visible light source. Between reflectivity to thwart flash photo's and IR emitters I'd have to say this gadget technically may be quite effective.
Dress a little nerdy, put on some out of fashion glasses and lose Superman's confidence and bingo he's socially invisible. Being mild mannered, as Clark Kent makes him as attention grabbing as a potted plant. Anyone thinking that bright lights that obscure your image on camera will lower your surveillance profile could take a lesson from Clark Kent. Infrared lights might have some value to someone actually committing a crime, but that just makes them that much more attention worthy for a daily wearer wishing to side-step ubiquitous surveillance. Digital cameras and camcorders generally have IR filters in place so that their recordings look more like the colors perceived by the human eye, so I'm not sure if this technology would do much to keep a protestor's face off the nightly news.
Agreed, this is a good way to get people very interested in watching you. Someone going this far out of their way to evade surveillance is naturally going to draw suspicion. I'm still holding out for the pattern shifting masks the cops wear in "A Scanner Darkly", those would at least be more fun. I started a petition once to ban the use of facial recognition on the public, maybe I didn't publicize it enough, but I didn't get many signatures. I thought there would be more people who would feel strongly that we shouldn't end up in a world where every photo online and every step into public space is connected to identity and subjected to tracking.
Yesterday we talked about robots getting us alcohol, now I have to wonder if the robot will get me a beer or just pray for me to have a beer?
I support Congressman Thomas Massie (R) - Kentucky for that reason. I have a lot of respect for him being one of the few that actually went on record publicly stating in a televised interview that Snowden did a service to the people. I commend him for that courage.
Margarita Manufacture on a truck or Pizza making in a delivery truck. How about I patent the process of patenting shit with no innovative value or R&D investment for the general purpose of patent trolling and cock blocking competition.
I like the E-Ink readers like Kindle for the same reasons of eye strain. I do often end up reading books for study purposes on the Kindle for PC client as I find it faster to add highlights and turn pages on the PC. What I'd really like would be a larger format E-Ink device with two 8.5 by 11" screens so it lays out just like the book and rescanning the previous page becomes easier. Then I just need a pen style touch input to make easy highlights of text I need to reference again. As it is, even my 9.7" Kindle DX just isn't enough visual real estate for technical study that often has large diagrams. I often end up throwing it on my 23" monitor despite how much I hate LCD screens for reading.
I'd still say one primary benefit of said HIPPA privacy is that the personal information can't be used against you. I'll admit I am disappointed to find discrimination in hiring due to medical status can be legal if it doesn't qualify under ADA, GINA or Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA). I'd always thought all medical info was off limits for employment screening, but I guess that is just HR keeping us from asking questions that might expose an issue in a protected category. As far as creditors being able to deny you a loan for medical reasons, I'd really hate to see people who need to take out a home equity line in order to deal with a medical crisis potentially get denied because they have a medical crisis. There are cases where lenders will get burned because of something they don't know, but allowing medical info into the mix with traditional financial info is an ethical rabbit hole that I feel is best avoided.
| Re:--> What "harm"? If a syphilis-infection, for example, increases one's danger of bankruptcy, his credit score should reflect that.
I have no doubt serious medical problems, or any number of very private factors in an individuals personal life increase their risk of default. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be a curtain that that creditors should not be able to look behind. What a person shares unwittingly may not be covered by HIPPA, but protecting people from medical discrimination is in the spirit of why HIPPA exists. In this case we are talking about search history. There is no reliable way to know that the person doing the searching is the subject of the search, or that multiple financially unrelated people aren't sharing a computer. You can't legally discriminate in hiring based on medical info, creditors shouldn't ever be allowed to use that data either, especially not unsubstantiated data collected without the individual's knowledge.
It's not enough to have liability associated with copyright violation. They have to make sure people don't have violation as an available option. Clearly that sort of freedom would be bad for business. Personally, I'd rather people have the choice of breaking any law they choose if they are willing to risk the consequences. It's a model that feels much more American to me than any attempt at crime prevention through the deprivation of free will.
For me it's NoScript, Adblock, Ghostery, BetterPrivacy and Refcontrol, on every computer, every time. Only Startpage for search. I'd love to support DuckDuckGo, but the search results aren't as effective at this point. I blackhole over 300 domains in DNS just for good measure. Google's Advertising Cookie Opt-Out plugin is useless because I clear all cookies and temp files every time I shut down. Without using TOR, that's about as good as I know how to get it. I also null route over 100 foreign
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
