Stewart Baker writes: Privacy groups put much of their effort into attacking new technologies for a reason. They’re afraid that, once we see a technology in action, we won’t be scared by its hypothetical risks, while its benefits will be easier to assess. Once that happens, imposing new privacy laws gets a lot harder. To…
Category: Misc
Are biometric ID tools evil?
Mike Elgan writes: Moss Bluff Elementary School in Lake Charles, La., wanted to speed up the cafeteria line and reduce errors in lunch accounting. So the school bought a Fujitsu PalmSecure biometric ID system, which has a scanner that reads the unique patterns of blood vessels in a human palm, enabling a positive ID, much like…
EPIC: Voters Should Be Wary of 2012 Election Apps
From EPIC.org: EPIC has released a report, “Smartphones and the 2012 Election,” which focuses on the potential risks to voters who download election-related apps to their smartphones and tablets. The report contends that these apps promote greater citizen participation in e-democracy, but also may contain malware, disseminate false information — or, as was recently reported about an…
Email Privacy Pioneer Launches Silent Circle To Protect Mobile, Internet Calls
An Internet privacy veteran and inventor of a popular email encryption scheme is launching a suite of new products next month that will allow people to scramble their mobile phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Internet voice and video calls. Phil Zimmermann, creator of the standard email encryption known as PGP, which stands for ‘Pretty Good Privacy’,…