Michael Zimmer.org

Recently, the EFF released a report named “On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever“, introducing some of the basic threats to locational privacy:
Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people’s movements through public space will be woven inextricably into the fabric of everyday life. We are already starting to see such systems now, and there will be many more in the near future.
Here are some examples you might already have used or read about:

Monthly transit swipe-cards
Electronic tolling devices (FastTrak, EZpass, congestion pricing)
Cellphones
Services …

[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz]
This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of …

Two years ago I blogged about a very chilling precedent from an upstate New York federal judge who ruled that police can secretly attach Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant, stating that suspects had “no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway.” Seems another federal judge agrees, expanding this dangerous precedent.
The 7th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled against a defendant who claimed that the surreptitious placement of a GPS tracking device amounted to an …

I just received a (spam) e-mail asking me if I’m interested in becoming a reseller of the TrackStick or TrackStick Pro. Um, no.
TrackStick is a GPS tracking device featuring software integrated with Google Maps to enable tracking of oneself (I suppose) and amateur surveillance of others (more likely). The device records its location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals. With over 1Mb of memory, they claim it can store months of travel information. Downloading the data to their software allows the user to trace the devices activity …

The NY Times has a feature today on the prevalence of GPS-enabled cell phones for the surveillance of one’s kids. (Boost Mobile [page has audio] has also been pitching their GPS tracking features to adults so you can “know where your friends are at.”)
Unfortunately I’m much too busy writing the diss to provide any nuanced reaction (I’ll link to related posts below the jump). Suffice it to say that the word “privacy” does not appear in the Times article.

GPS systems installed on Milwaukee Police squad cars to help dispatchers track officers’ whereabouts have recently been found covered with foil, rendering them useless and the cars invisible to monitoring. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
A Milwaukee police captain was walking through the District 7 garage over the summer when he noticed something wasn’t right about the satellite tracking antenna on the back of a squad car.
A closer look revealed that the small square global positioning system antenna was wrapped in aluminum foil.
Capt. Donald Gaglione called the radio shop and confirmed …

The New York Times recently extolled the virtues of using GPS in digital cameras and camera cellphones to “geotag” photos with the location at which they were taken:
…advocates of geotagging, like Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, contend that linking pictures to maps can lend a new dimension to photography. For one thing, it can help people make some sense of the mounds of photos accumulating on their hard drives.
”The value may not be immediately apparent. But 10 years from now, nobody who’s geotagging their photos is …

There has been a spurt of media attention paid to the privacy and surveillance concerns of GPS enabled cellphones:

GPS Surveillance Creeps into Daily Life (New Standard)
Cellphone as Tracker: X Marks Your Doubts (New York Times)
Phone service allows people to track their friends (San Francisco Chronicle)

I don’t have a lot of time to comment right now, but this excerpt from the New Standard article sums up much of my concern:
Koroknay-Palicz also sees long-term consequences of this monitoring.
“If we raise kids with no expectation of privacy, then they’re going to become …

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution features a nice article that pieces together many of the privacy concerns with new transportation technologies – a central focus of much of my research. The article notes the desire to use GPS to track vehicle movements to facilitate assessing mileage taxes, vehicle-to-vehicle communication technologies to improve safety and the already ubiquitous use of RFID technology for automated tolling.
The piece introduces new research – “the adaptation of defense technology” – to automatically count the number of people in a vehicle so road authorities can charge variable tolls …

The NY Times writes about Oregon’s experiments with a per-mile fee system that could replace general gas taxes. By installing GPS location tracking devices in every car, mileage could be tracked and users would have taxes levied on how much they use the roads, not on how much gas they purchase.
The Times article does note the privacy concerns of amassing a large database of drivers’ locations and driving habits. One of the easiest ways to avoid these concerns is to delete the data after the necessary tax calcuations are made …

Red Herring reports that Verizon Wireless is launching a GPS tracking service called “Verizon Chaperone” so parents can monitor the location of their children via their cellphones. Along with the ability of parents to log into a website to determine the cellphone’s location, Verizon will also offer a “geo-fencing” service whereby a parent receives a text-message if their kid’s phone moves outside a pre-defined area.
This probably is a valuable service for safety-conscious parents, but does open the door (which has generally been kept closed due to privacy concerns) to the …

(via Privacy.org)A very chilling precedent from an upstate New York federal judge who ruled that police can secretly attach Global Positioning System devices to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant, stating that suspects had “no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway”:
“Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the public highways,” [Judge] Hurd wrote.
Assistant U.S. Attorney David Grable, who is prosecuting Moran, strongly backed the ruling.
“Your movements on a highway aren’t private,” he said. …

Since many states use gasoline taxes to help fund highway projects and road repairs, the increased usage of gas/electric hybrids hit are causing cash-strapped states to warn of rough roads ahead. California & Oregon are reported to be considering a replacement for the gas tax altogether, a “tax by the mile”:
“Drivers will get charged for how many miles they use the roads, and it’s as simple as that,” says engineer David Kim.
Kim and his team at Oregon State University equipped a test car with a global positioning device to keep …