Inside View

Protect Personal Privacy Online

THE ONLY WAY to protect your privacy online is to conceal your true self to intrusive actions around you. When you walk down a street, you're likely to encounter a surveillance camera and some of those clips end up in the cloud. With fac...

Living Where Object Maps Would Help

I LIVE IN A semi-rural area in Ireland (evidence at left) where nobody knows the numerical designations of most of the roads. This seasoned ignorance becomes apparent when American visitors ring up for instructions, politely mentioning t...

Privacy and the police

CLONMEL -- There is a hallway of over-sized photographs in the arrivals hall of Dublin Airport. The six-foot tall mugshots represent a cross-section of the Immigration Control Branch attached to the airport. Anthony Haughey shot the imag...

A Holistic View of Competition #privacy

Image from Alex Castro in The Verge. IN A MAJOR case against Facebook, the US government is defining "harms" in a holistic way. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges harm occurs if a company buys another company specifically to...

RFID Privacy Issues

SUNTIMES -- While IT managers see immediate supply chain benefits to RFID, some privacy advocates send up red flares in warning. The Chicago Sun-Times uncovered a test done by Wal-Mart in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where RFID tags on Max Fa...

Privacy Discussion around the Breakfast Table

I WONDER if I should startle my primary school children with discussions about what other people can see and hear. After I made a short audio clip on Anchor (an app you can get on Android and iOS) about this idea, I started to wonder if ...

I have no Irish ID. Am I a threat?

KILKENNY -- I passed through Dublin Airport four times during the past nine weeks without requisite photo identification. I need a National Immigration ID card to stay in Ireland. Because of a creaky infrastructure system in the regions,...

DNA Pap Smear

POLITECHBOT -- Declan McCullagh writes about "developments straight out of GATTACA's handshake scene (detailed in) a Kansas City Star report (that) indicates that the suspected "BTK" killer was tentatively linked to crime scene evidence ...

False Security

AS ANYONE IN the security business will affirm, the best way to protect your community from terrorist attacks is to prevent them from happening. This important operating principle gets short shrift in most of the coverage following the a...

Naughton's Psych Profile of Scoble

JOHN NAUGHTON, THE NETWORKER, sinks his teeth into the Scoble debacle (a dust-up many in Ireland missed because of light work weeks between Christmas and Valentine's Day). Naughton says, "Watching Scoble in action is like taking a puppy ...