Tag: privacy
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This week’s New Scientist features an article entitled Smartphone surveillance: The cop in your pocket (kerching). In it, a rather breathless Nic Fleming waxes lyrically about how, thanks to our smartphones, “we are all set to gain unprecedented crime-fighting abilities.” Sadly, however, it is not through being able to download mad martial arts skillz via…
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I can’t help but smell a rat over the current media furore over superinjunctions. It started out perfectly honourably, with a genuine freedom of speech issue surrounding Trafigura. Clearly a company which had been caught dumping toxic waste should not be able to hide behind a legal nicety reserved solely for the wealthy. But what…
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Background: last week I wrote a short article on Lib Dem Voice about the ippr’s new report on surveillance and data protection, pointing out how it had been funded and lamenting the fact that Lord Ashdown has, in effect, been used to legitimise the argument. This resulted in a furious response from Lord Ashdown himself,…
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Unaccustomed as I am to defending Boris Johnson, I’m not convinced that publishing crime maps would necessarily result in a breach of data protection. Didn’t we solve this problem with census data decades ago? A more intriguing objection is the complaint by RICS that “publicising high crime areas in such detail could literally wipe thousands…
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It is none of my business if David Cameron’s disabled son has been rushed to hospital or not, but it does raise an issue about the way Cameron expects to be able to turn his family’s privacy on and off like a tap whenever its suits him. Apart from that recent ITN footage of him…