green_amber (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
green_amber) wrote2008-06-17 10:50 pm
green_amber) wrote2008-06-17 10:50 pm
It's amazing..
.. wbat you see on TV news actually - clearly I should watch it more often.
Local news had this story
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/20/tracking_phones/
What do people think? Despite the obvious knee jerk reaction, as the info is completely non attributable to identified individuals, I really can't see a problem. You could get exactly the same results (at greater cost) by posting tellers at each shop or destination in the shopping centre to do counts all day - would anyone object to that on privacy grounds? As a privacy specialist, I think it's important to seperate technophobic squeamishness from real concerns. (This is also not like Phorm where anonymity couod easily be "broken". Here the mobile tracking system simply doesn't know your personal phone number or your name.)
Of course you need to seperate it too from something like Sniff.
And in the Guardian today, I nearly choked on my post-swim coffee at the ostensible discovery that gay men and heterosexual women (and straight men and lesbians)apparently have similar shaped brains . If true this could destroy several decades of careful work on cultural construction :)
Heavens, there's a world out there that isn't all about me:-P
Local news had this story
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/20/tracking_phones/
What do people think? Despite the obvious knee jerk reaction, as the info is completely non attributable to identified individuals, I really can't see a problem. You could get exactly the same results (at greater cost) by posting tellers at each shop or destination in the shopping centre to do counts all day - would anyone object to that on privacy grounds? As a privacy specialist, I think it's important to seperate technophobic squeamishness from real concerns. (This is also not like Phorm where anonymity couod easily be "broken". Here the mobile tracking system simply doesn't know your personal phone number or your name.)
Of course you need to seperate it too from something like Sniff.
And in the Guardian today, I nearly choked on my post-swim coffee at the ostensible discovery that gay men and heterosexual women (and straight men and lesbians)apparently have similar shaped brains . If true this could destroy several decades of careful work on cultural construction :)
Heavens, there's a world out there that isn't all about me:-P
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My favourite one is the department store who hired one of my clients at the height of the bird flu fear epidemic to monitor customer's body temperatures as they walked in the stores so that they could pick up if anyone had a high temperature & was likely to have flu.
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On the brains thing I suggest we wait until if Ben Goldacre or one of his chums pronounces on the legitimacy of the claim (that's a euphemism for "utterly shreds").
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