News & Commentary

Google's new Street View service, which allows users of Google Maps to view and navigate street-level images may help some people get around, but it raises serious privacy concerns for individuals who are unwittingly captured by Google's candid cameras.

Several websites have already taken up the sport of posting links to snapshots of the streets preserved by Google's camera vans.

However, Facebook does not screen developers for trustworthiness, and cannot (and does not) guarantee that all third-party developers will follow these rules. See updated privacy policy

The Identity Information Protection Act (SB 30), the first bill in the country to require privacy and security protections for the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in state government-issued ID's passed the California State Senate this morning with a strong bipartisan vote of 33-2.

Earlier this week, the U.S. military ordered troops to stop posting to blogs and sending personal emails without getting clearance. More information here. And the regulations here.

We are now living in a world where the technology exists to keep track of everything we do and say and everywhere we go. Video surveillance, RFID chips that allow stored data to be read at a distance, and massive databases of who we call and what Internet sites we browse mean more information about our lives is being preserved, and being preserved for longer periods of time.

Advances in digital storage capacity, and computers now capable of efficiently indexing and searching vast amounts of archived digital data, seem to be leading our society toward a digital version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon , a world in which citizens limit their speech and actions for fear of how endlessly retained surveillance or personal data might someday be used against them.

But some academics and scientists are turning technology on its head, developing technical solutions that help to enhance users' privacy.

For example, Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government argues in a recent working paper that personal digital information should have a reasonable, predetermined shelf life, enforced by the same technologies that collect and store it.

In a similar vein, Belgian and German researchers have proposed a system to help individuals manage the photographs taken of them with cell phone cameras, integrated into the very camera-phones that take and transmit the pictures.

Late breaking news that the Board of Supervisor's Budget Committee will hold a public hearing on Monday afternoon about the Earthlink/Google contract.

While other states are courageously standing up to Congress' misguided national ID mandate, California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is giving his constituents a different, or shall we say, indifferent message.

If these documents are embedded with RFID tags, the government could use the technology to read all of our drivers'licenses from a distance, without our knowledge, as we walk down the street or attend a political protest or gun show- surreptitiously keeping track of who we are, where we go, and what we do.

The government's possible justification for tracking and monitoring all of us through National IDs? They might catch a few wrongdoers in the process.

Using RFI

ACLU of Northern California wrote an amicus brief on Josh Wolf's behalf in both the District Court and Ninth Circuit, contesting the government's argument that a journalist cannot invoke a First Amendment privilege when presented with a grand jury subpoena.

Click here for more information and to read the court documents.