[rarestia]

I think what terrifies me most about this scheme is not the scheme itself but the fact that nearly 50% of the country is okay with the idea of it. Put aside the Biblical connotations, this is literally putting your life and everything about you in the hands of corporations and governments. Leftists decry big corporation at every corner but are okay with the idea of letting them track everything about us? And they’re stridently against government when a Republican is in office but willing to give everything over to government when a liberal Democrat like Obama is in office?

Unfortunately, just like electronic medical records, this is going to become a standard sometime in the next 50 years, I suspect. Camel’s nose is already in the tent.

[trebb]

Yep - bad enough that one can be traced/backtracked by their phones/IPads/Chromebooks/cars, etc., there is no such thing as privacy anymore and we all fell into it under the guise of “convenience”.

[Alberta's Child]

The most interesting part of this whole issue, from my perspective, is the seemingly convoluted legal aspects of your "personal" electronic information. There was a U.S. Supreme Court case in the last year or two that hinged on a variation of this point. The issue in question related to the need for law enforcement to get a warrant to search mobile phone records that indicated a suspected criminal's location at the time the crime in question was committed.

Remarkably (but not so remarkably, when the details are understood), it was Clarence Thomas who authored an opinion (I believe it was a dissenting opinion in the case) that the police did NOT need a warrant to get the phone records in that case. His reasoning was quite sound: Under the terms of the mobile phone contract for the accused criminal, the phone company retained ownership of all those records and data and were free to use it as they saw fit. In simple terms ... the Fourth Amendment protections against searches and seizures without a warrant do not apply to information that a person has voluntarily given to someone else.

Justice Thomas made it clear that having this kind of information out there with limited protection may not be a good idea. But that's a matter for Congress to determine, not a constitutional matter.

Those of us who are legitimately concerned about the privacy of our records would do well to think hard about just how important all these electronic devices really are in our lives. And if they are, and we are still concerned about the privacy of our records, then perhaps we should be working on methods to obscure this information or even disseminate misleading information through our devices.