Two Ph. D’s writing papers, one saying that electronic records are causing us to lose our ability to forget. And one saying that electronic records are causing us to lose our ability to remember.
Now I don’t feel so bad about my confusion on this matter.
via RM discussion list
McDonald’s and Tim Horton’s will start to use Radio Frequency identification (RFID) to make purchases. The use of RFID technology has alarmed privacy watchdogs since it can potentially be used to surveil or monitor the movement of the chip holders.
In this case, the product enables users to forego swiping cards through a reader or punching pin numbers. Transactions can be completed by merely tapping or waving the PayPass card on a terminal.
The devices are ideal for low-value purchases in high-traffic environments.
In other words? Speed and convenience.
I would argue that convenience here equals the opportunity to make more money just as credit cards wrack up so much debt from users.
Let the buyer beware.
You shouldn’t expect that anything you post on your MySpace page will be kept private. If you are in the middle of litigation alleging that you’re disabled, don’t post pictures of your skiing vacation.
read Canadian Privacy Law Blog highlights of a case from Ontario, the first Canadian case to mention MySpace. The defendants attempted to use info from the plaintiff’s MySpace page as a basis for further discoveries.
I have seen some doozy signature files in my time. Some time ago I even posted about this job title from hell.
Today, via the same discussion list (that shall remain unnamed), came this whopper of a disclaimer. Imagine attaching this to the bottom of every single email you write!
“This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, any reading, printing, storage, disclosure, copying or any other action taken in respect of this e-mail is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by using the reply function and then permanently delete what you have received.
Incoming and outgoing e-mail messages are routinely monitored for compliance with [XYZ] County Council’s policy on the use of electronic communications. The contents of e-mails may have to be disclosed to a request under the [XYZ] Act.
The views expressed by the author may not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the [XYZ] County Council.
Attachments to e-mail messages may contain viruses that may damage your system. Whilst [XYZ] County Council has taken every reasonable precaution to minimise this risk, we cannot accept any liability for any damage which you sustain as a result of these factors. You are advised to carry out your own virus checks before opening any attachment.”
Good grief. How lame is that?
For those of you wondering about the validity of such disclaimers, here is my take:
For businesses and institutions in Ontario, there is no statutory obligation to include them. But they make sense for lawyers since, from a legal standpoint, it is good to underscore the point that “privileged” info remains privileged even if it gets accidentally disseminated.
I can think of one con and one pro for using such disclaimers and you should weigh these and decide which means more for you:
Con: it doesn’t reduce risk. If the e-mail or fax gets into the wrong hands and it contains the personal information of another individual then it is a breach, regardless of the confidentiality notice. In a way, the notice merely draws attention to the weakness in the security of, and lack of diligence on the sender’s part in, sending information in these ways. So in that sense, it doesn’t reduce risk.
Pro: reminds all parties of confidentiality, even if this is not binding. In addition to alerting the recipient that the info may be sensitive, it also reminds the staff sending the email (i.e. internally) that they are dealing with potentially confidential information. That could help raise awareness and may even cause them to pause and re-check that the addressee is correct.
Here’s a tip:
If you do not delete email you receive at work that was not intended for you and which contains the personal information of another individual, you may not be in compliance with your local privacy legislation (e.g. FIPPA) which very likely requires legal authority to collect personal information. Without this authority you cannot collect personal information—even if it was sent to you mistakenly.
Now tell the truth — if I put that in my disclaimer at the bottom of my email, do you think I would elicit a better response from inadvertent recipients? Just goes to show how much better it is to actually explain things rather than to demand that others perform certain actions to remedy your own stupid push of the button.
With recent concern around Google censoring results in China, I found this post interesting: searching through the great firewall of China. It shows how to get past some filtering restrictions (doesn’t work with Google but it does with some other search engines). I like the spirit of this post — more than bemoaning the situation of company and/or country. For example? Circumventing Internet Censorship. See also proxy searching which lets you surf the net in privacy (that page also shows you how to see what sites are banned by countries and how you can check to see which companies ban specific sites).
Recently, some of ex-classmates at FIMS have wrestled with filtering in London Public Library. Apparently, LPL is planning to monitor the public’s response over the next six months at which time they will, presumably, review and revise as necessary.
I am indifferent to the storm since I am all about: (a) anonymity on the Internet; and (b) getting around such bind-holds anyway. So I support empowering the citizen with the technical means to circumvent such filtering as described in the article above. For example? How to disable CYBERsitter, Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol, Surfwatch and other net babysitter programs or P E A C E F I R E
A similar storm recently came to light when the Internet radio station Pandora stopped streaming to foreign (non-US) countries. Again, it is easy enough to fool your browser – you just have to research how.
I am generally pessimistic when it comes to librarian activism. I see librarians as poor messengers — they do a terrible job at advocacy about their own profession so I am certainly not looking to them for moral guidance on other issues. Frankly, they do a poor job at explaining most things — reference librarians being a case in point. The true good of librarians comes from educating users to do their own searches effectively. I haven’t met many librarians that do this well — they are not teachers, after all. But the point is I support putting the tools of how to get information in the hands of citizens.
The fact remains that such goals remain obscured, however, until the individual learns to ask the right question.
So back to my contemplative domain. Let sleeping dogs lie, eh?