Posted on 02/09/2005 11:14:24 AM PST by FreeMarket1
No, they'd use your purchase history to find you and cut off parts of you, not your supply of Dr. Pepper.
Why would they need my purchasing habits? They have my address.
They would use it all to paint a picture about your life. It gives them more options about how to get you-- to make it look less suspicious and to catch you off guard.
Can't get much less suspicious than getting some one at home, it's not a public space so it's less likely to be observed by third parties which I could shout some rebelious mottos to. They also have my license plate number so if nothing else they could just put out an APB on my car and pick up in a "routine" traffic stop.
Sorry your scenario makes no sense, of all the little pieces of information they could collect about you to decide where to nab you the grocery store is about the stupidest place they could pick. Some one going all rebelious is likely to change their habits, probably in an effort to get off the grid, the first place you're going to stop going is your neighborhood grocery store, the hardest place to leave behind though is home since that's where people store their stuff and loved ones. You need a new nightmare scenario, this one falls apart in about 30 seconds of review.
Most of the new cell phones have GPS locators in them. They have been touting it as "We can tell you the closest theatres, restaurants, etc." to your present location. It is automatically activated when you dial 911, no need for triangulation.
Here's an idea...if you don't want the govt knowing what you are doing, why are you doing it? I understand the privacy parts of it...but really, I don't care if the police, FBI, NSA, etc monitors my phone calls or whereabouts. I just feel for anyone actually assigned to watch me. "Yup, he is at home...now he is at work...hmmm wife just called to ask him to pick up some groceries...there he goes stopping at Stater Bros. on the way home...spent $56.95...now he's at home again...guess we'll pick him up again at 0600 when he goes to work tomorrow."
Just wait until the Navigation systems in cars automatically spit out speeding tickets. :)
Then nobody will speed anymore and traffic in Tucson will grind to a standstill. Don't know how anyone gets anywhere in this town at less than 10 over.
Ah...that's true. I learned to drive in Phoenix. If you were not doing 10 over, you were in the wrong. Now with all the traffic cameras all over the place...I had to move to CA. :)
Lawmakers in several states this week are preparing rules to prevent Wal-Mart and other companies from using radio-frequency identification tags to spy on their customers.
In statehouses in Utah and California, and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, legislators and regulators discussed how retailers and government spies might use the data gathered from RFID tags to monitor consumers.
Utah's House of Representatives passed the first-ever RFID privacy bill this week, 47-23. Utah state Rep. David Hogue said that without laws to ensure consumer privacy, retailers will be tempted to match the data gathered by RFID readers with consumers' personal information.
"The RFID industry will carry the technology as far as they can," said Hogue, sponsor of the Radio Frequency Identification Right to Know Act. "Marketing people especially are going to love this kind of stuff."
Utah's Right to Know Act is based on federal legislation drafted by the consumer privacy group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN. It requires all goods bearing functioning RFID tags in stores to be labeled as such. The bill will take effect May 5, 2005, if it is approved by the Utah state Senate and Utah Gov. Olene S. Walker.
California state Sen. Debra Bowen also introduced a bill intended to keep the data from RFID tags separate from consumers' personal information.
And officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston this week met with consumer advocates to learn how the information gathered from RFID tags might be used to monitor shoppers' movements and buying behavior.
By matching an RFID tag's unique electronic product code to a customer's loyalty card or credit card, a retailer could track a shopper's movements, and tailor its marketing pitches to whatever the customer is wearing or to the items in his or her cart.
CASPIAN director Katherine Albrecht also warned officials at the Federal Reserve that spies may want to track citizens with ubiquitous RFID readers embedded in public spaces. The readers could recognize tags that have been hidden inside shoes and other garments by manufacturers, she said.
Some lawmakers now say that RFID tags in retail items may further erode consumers' privacy. "There is clearly an upside for the industry," said Massachusetts state Sen. Jarrett Barrios, "but underlying that is a burden borne by the consumers. It's unnerving to me that the companies have no incentive to protect consumer privacy."
Barrios, who sponsored an aggressive antispam bill that passed the Massachusetts Senate last year, said he is concerned by any technology that threatens consumers' privacy. "And if the past is any indication," he said, "it will again (in the case of RFID tags) be up to legislators to protect consumers' personal information."
Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Gillette want to use RFID tags to track every bottle of shampoo or packet of razor blades from the factory floor to the store shelf. RFID readers on so-called smart shelves in Wal-Mart will tally the shelves' contents continually, and make more-precise requests for inventory from the retailer's suppliers.
Retailers will have fewer empty shelves, and suppliers will eliminate wasteful overproduction of their goods, say proponents of RFID.
But shoppers are wary of RFID tags since Wal-Mart was caught secretly experimenting with the tags in its stores in Brockton, Massachusetts, and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, last year. "Some companies naively thought that privacy would not be an issue for consumers," said Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal, an RFID trade publication.
None of the retail tests of RFID tags invaded the privacy of shoppers in the Wal-Mart stores, Roberti said. He also said that RFID chips in building security passes and toll-booth tags have never been used to invade a citizen's privacy.
EPCglobal, which sets the technology standards for RFID tags in retail and in the supply chain, is promoting its own privacy policy and appointing a full-time policy executive to oversee privacy issues.
But privacy advocates do not trust retailers and suppliers to police themselves.
RFID technology is a surveillance tool that clearly can be misused, said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "To protect consumers, we need laws, not unenforceable policies," he said.
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. -In a sprawling complex tucked in the hills of this Appalachian town, a roomful of supercomputers attempt to sift America's guilty from its innocent.
This is where the FBI keeps its vast database of fingerprints, allowing examiners to conduct criminal checks from computer screens in less than 30 minutes - something that used to take them weeks as they rummaged through 2,100 file cabinets stuffed with inked print cards.
But the same digital technology that has allowed the FBI to speed up such checks over the past few years has created the risk of accusing people who are innocent, the Chicago Tribune has found.
Across the country, police departments and crime labs are submitting fingerprints for comparisons and entry into databases, using digital images that might be missing crucial details or might have been manipulated without the FBI's knowing it.
Not unlike a picture from the typical digital camera, a digital fingerprint provides less complete detail than a traditional photographic image. That lack of precision raises the specter of false identifications in criminal cases.
"There's a risk that not only would they exclude someone incorrectly - we have the potential to identify someone incorrectly," said David Grieve, a prominent fingerprint expert who is the latent prints training coordinator for the Illinois State Police crime lab system.
Equally troublesome, the most commonly used image-enhancement software, Adobe Photoshop, leaves no record of some of the changes police technicians can perform as they clean up fingerprint images to make them easier to compare.
This issue is crucial because it raises questions about a bulwark of the criminal justice system: chain of custody. If authorities can't prove a fingerprint is an accurate representation of the original and show exactly how it was handled, its validity can be questioned.
FBI officials recognize the resolution problem but say it leads to overlooking guilty individuals, not falsely accusing the innocent. "The risk that we're hearing is that we miss people - because the resolution isn't enough - not that we're identifying people incorrectly," said Jerry Pender, deputy assistant FBI director at Clarksburg.
Such confidence is unwarranted, according to digital-imaging specialists and some leading fingerprint experts. They say the potential for mistakes is growing inexorably as police departments around the nation switch from old inked cards to digitized computer images.
"It gives examiners the misleading impression that they're getting a better quality image to examine," said Michael Cherry, an imaging expert who is on the evidentiary committee of the Association for Information and Image Management, a business technology trade group. "These images actually can eliminate fingerprint characteristics that might exclude a suspect."
Measuring the number of cases where a digital image might have wrongly linked a suspect to a crime scene is difficult. The technology is so new that many defense attorneys don't know to ask whether the fingerprint image entered into evidence has been digitized.
"I think it's a very real problem, but it's under the [radar] still," said Mary Defusco, director of training at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a nonprofit group that represents indigent defendants. "We have to get up to speed on it."
One of the nation's first successful challenges to the use of digital fingerprinting in the courtroom came last year in Broward County, Florida.
The only physical evidence linking Victor Reyes to the murder of Henry Guzman was a partial palm print - an intriguing trace of evidence found on duct tape used to wrap the body in a peach-colored comforter.
A forensic analyst with the Broward County sheriff's office used a software program known as MoreHits along with Adobe Photoshop to darken certain areas and lighten others - a process called "dodge and burn," that has long been used in traditional photography.
Reyes' attorney, Barbara Heyer, argued that such digital enhancements were inappropriate manipulations of the evidence. "It just hasn't gotten to the point of reliability," Heyer said.
Jurors acquitted Reyes, largely because of sloppy handling of the evidence by police. But they were troubled by the digital fingerprinting technology in the case. The jury foreman, Richard Morris, who happens to write computer-imaging software for a living, said in a recent interview that he and his fellow jurors had significant concerns about it.
"The makers of the [Adobe] software dropped the ball in not providing a digital record of every action applied to the image," Morris said. He said he would like to see lab analysts or police personnel use software that automatically logs any changes so that other examiners could come back later to determine whether the digital print had been inappropriately altered.
Ten years ago, only a handful of major police departments used digital fingerprinting. Today, more than 80 percent of the prints submitted to the FBI's Clarksburg facility are digital.
Along with the digital technology has come inexpensive software that allows personnel at many police stations to enhance the prints at their desks. One of the most widely used programs, MoreHits, claims about 150 clients among local, state, federal and foreign law enforcement agencies.
The creators of these explosively popular tools also recognize the potential problems. "It's like a hammer. It's not evil unless someone who is evil picks it up and uses it," said Erik Berg, a forensic expert with the Tacoma Police Department who developed MoreHits.
Defenders of the technology contend that concerns about it are overstated because computers only spit out a list of potential matches; typically, human fingerprint examiners at the FBI's lab and at state crime labs make the final matches introduced in court.
Trust in that safeguard took a hit last spring when the FBI falsely linked an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, to bombings at Madrid train stations.
When Spanish authorities connected the Madrid print to an Algerian man, the FBI had to admit it erred. And the bureau initially blamed the quality of a digital fingerprint image forwarded from the Spanish National Police.
An international panel of experts later concluded that the digital image was fine; instead, several veteran FBI examiners had missed "easily observed" details that excluded Mayfield.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.