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February 28, 2006
Schneier on Cameras in Bars
In an insightful post on a facial recognition system for bars, BioBouncer, Schneier points out important issues for the storage of information collected by bars. These issues are directly relevant to proposals for mandating cameras in bars. He states in regards to collecting data:
Anyone want to guess how long that "automatically flushed at the end of each night" will last. This data has enormous value. Insurance companies will want to know if someone was in a bar before a car accident. Employers will want to know if their employees were drinking before work -- think airplane pilots. Private investigators will want to know who walked into a bar with whom. The police will want to know all sorts of things. Lots of people will want this data -- and they'll all be willing to pay for it.
And the data will be owned by the bars who collect it. They can choose to erase it, or they can choose to sell it to data aggregators like Acxiom.
It's rarely the initial application that's the problem. It's the follow-on applications. It's the function creep. Before you know it, everyone knows that they are identified the moment they walk into a commercial building. We will all lose privacy, and liberty, and freedom as a result.
Posted by rshah at February 28, 2006 04:17 PM
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