In Regards to Google Latitude

I posted the following at Internet Tablet Talk:

Quote:

Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post

that's the whole point of these services: that people explicitly want to let their friends and family know where they are. sometimes.

End Quote



Again I return to the idea that family and friends will be in a position to query as to why you have not shared your location. That is the expected norm will not be "I don't know and that's OK." Rather it will be "I don't know, therefore something is wrong." That is a huge fundamental change. I'm particularly concerned about this from a legal point of view as I'm currently reading a book concerning reasonable doubt and a jury's concept of privacy and guilt.



Anyway, if you read a recent report on ArsTechnica, you have a web company that had an advertiser put a box inline with their network that captured all customers net traffic for various reasons. The "Opt out" was buried in some fine text in the long "user agreement." and it was found that even those who opted out STILL had their traffic being logged by this third party.



So enough of the "explicit" junk.



Quote:

Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post

really, i don't understand all the fuzz. and i am concerned about my privacy in general (which is one of the reasons why i avoid using google services whenever possible and why i'm still surprised how easily people hand over their mails, contacts, documents, calendars to this company)



End Quote



The fuzz is about in the end the expectation of individual privacy. The US's NSA is on record as being very happy about people giving up this kind of information voluntarily because it lowers the legal expectation of privacy for them. This bothers me. The current trend is that once a large enough portion of the population volunteers to give up a certain level of privacy, then the government finds a means to then claim that the rest of us have given it up as well. This is specifically why the NSA got in it's head to use ATT, Verizon, etc.



The Fed is constrained by the 4th Amendment against warrantless searches of your private stuff. However no private company is under such a constraint. You then waive your privacy rights to internet company A, Internet company A then allows the government to access It's data, which was previously your private data, and you get a warrantless search. Now couple that with legislation "requiring" retention of logs and you have a whole lot of latitude for abuse.



But all you wanted to do is see an icon of your friend floating on a Google map.

Clearly I'm not going to be using the Google service.

Shortly after making that post I ran across the following on Ars Technica:

According to a slew of federal court rulings, police can use hidden tracking devices to monitor the public movements of a person or vehicle without bothering with a court order, since these devices don't violate any "reasonable expectation of privacy." But the sponsors of a bill making its way through the Georgia General Assembly think these GPS trackers do violate a privacy interest worth protecting—at least when they're used by private citizens.

I had completely forgotten about this police can track you if they like laws but it underscores my argument made on the other site that the lowered expectation of "reasonable" privacy is in fact endangered by widespread use of tracking devices which. Honestly could you imaging the founders approving of the state tracking a citizen without court order?

The bill "would make it a crime to "use an electronic tracking device to determine the location or movement of another person without such other person's consent," Really? But you know what I think got this ball rolling? When Rental car companies thought it was a good idea to use GPS on vehicles customers rented in order to see if they drove over the speed limit for purposes of billing them extra for speeding. Never mind that speed does not cause accidents but lack of control and attention does. These same rental car companies don't bill you extra for owning a cell phone, the use of which is as bad as driving drunk in terms of reaction time. But anyway, millions of people gladly exchanged "privacy" for access to a vehicle. Therefore it was not much for the state to argue that people do not reasonably expect to have their comings and going tracked, specifically for "safety" and "security."

What is particularly egregious about this legislation is that when we see that the executive has the "right" to declare anyone it sees fit as a "terrorist" and that such a label already allows for all manner of extra-judical detention (which it appears the Obama administration is OK with) Now the state can attach a device to your private property (you know that thing that the 4th Amendment says you are "secure in") in order to track the vehicle's movement (not necessarily the owner's) 24/7. And should the battery on that device die they can come back to your property, and trade out the tracking device.

I'm sure that the judges that approved of this, as well as the idiots that wrote it, thought, Oh if you're innocent you have nothing to hide. Rather than, this is someone's property, who is presumed innocent of whatever it is that the state wants to investigate and therefore the court ought to protect them and their property from state intrusion a la 4th amendment.