LuminousVoid

I have heard that in general the EU has stronger privacy laws than here in the US. Some regimes hold that consumer data belongs to the consumer, the subject of the data, rather than to the corporate entitity that has collected the data. I don’t know exactly how that plays out, but looks to be an interesting topic for a future post.

They do seem to be looking closely at RFID: The European Union Works Out RFID Privacy Legislation. Two concerns appear to be individual geographic tracking and proper security of environmentally promiscuous technology, and they seem to be placing some of the responsibility for these features with the manufacturers and researchers.

The new working group says it has found other issues with regard to RFID that need to be addressed. RFID technology increases the potential for direct marketing with item-level tagging, since shoppers could be recognized and their movements tracked while in stores, according to the group.
Another concern for the EU working group is the use of applications that link an RFID-enabled plastic card with a consumer’s bank-account number to enable payment processing, similar to a credit card, without having to swipe the magnetic strip.
Manufacturers of RFID equipment and applications should be held equally responsible for building tags, readers, and printers that protect consumers’ right to privacy, the document states.

They reference other potential issues in the article.

The article also discusses an EU Working Paper. The English PDF is here.

There’s been a tiff lately between Juan Cole, Middle Eastern Studies Professor, and Jonah Goldberg, uh, pundit. They’ve been going back and forth. The latest salvo has been from Cole. Without getting into all the details, I want to give kudos to Cole for this bit, tangential to his argument:

Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.