JP Manninen reports: A coffee shop pinging your cell phone with a deal for latte when you’re 300 feet away? A mother alerted when her child leaves the school grounds? All this is done with “geofencing“, the latest thing in location-based services, according to some proponents and users. Geofencing means setting up a virtual perimeter—the…
Category: Surveillance
Administrator agrees to surrender computer in Web cam case
John P. Martin brings us the latest development in the lawsuit against the Lower Merion School District for activating a webcam to record a student in the student’s home: The Lower Merion School District administrator who had the ability to activate the Web cams on students’ laptops agreed Friday to let investigators inspect her personal…
New airport security scanners a waste of money: Israeli security specialist
Not only do airport scanners raise a host of privacy issues, but according to an Israeli security specialist, they are also ineffective and a waste of money. Sarah Schmidt has the story for Canwest News on Canada.com. Thanks to the reader who sent in this link.
Justice Department plans to expand cops’ access to data
Ben Bain reports: The Justice Department plans to have a nationwide program to allow law enforcement officials from participating agencies to access data on each other’s unclassified systems, a senior department technology official said today. Jeremy Warren, Justice’s chief technology officer, said the program would use a federated identity management approach to let officials use…