Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.
I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens.
Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
Comments
Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.
I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens.
Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.
The year 1990 called and wants it's comment back!
You're saying that telecoms are already selling the data? Or that there are already laws preventing the sale of such data?
They sell it. See eg Vodafone and tomtom for a publicized example.