4 replies to this topic

[logifuse]

I was just listening to the radio & the guest mentioned that they'd signed up for a gmail account the other day & deliberately entered a dummy age much younger than they were. After submitting the form, it came back with the age highlighted saying that it doubted that was their real age.

The guy is reasonably well known & clearly what happened was the name & location were compared against details that had been compiled from other sources & it determined that if he was the person he was registering as, then he was older than he was saying.

That story was followed up with a few callers telling similar stories, but these were just regular people, not celebs or people with a public profile.

My immediate thought was that it's gotta be a breach of the privacy act, but my follow up thought was that it's pretty scary.

Justin

[Dean1M]

Funny you should mention that, I was reading this article earlier today.

http://www.nytimes.c...ooperation.html

The concept of somebody driving past and collecting this type of data is akin to being a peeping tom. Just because you can look into someone's private affairs does not mean you have the right to.

Interesting to note the comments of our esteemed Minister For Communications as quoted by the US press. He is right on the money. The problem is Federal Labor also said that the Hume Highway duplication would be completed in time for the bicentenary. Words are cheap! What we need is action.

Deano

Edited by Dean1M, 28 May 2012 - 10:42 PM.

[logifuse]

Fascinating article. Makes you wonder if Google will eventually become Skynet.

Probably too late, but I think I'll look at replacing Chrome with SRWare Iron or Comodo Dragon.

Justin

[davidgol]

I saw an interesting figure the other day.. I wonder if it's true:

armed with just your postcode (well zipcode - this was in the USA), date of birth and gender, it's possible to personally identify 87% of the population of the USA.

I'm guessing it's not all that different here in Australia. No doubt companies like Google have all that information already.

[DDH]

One of the European country privacy commissions just won the right to view the data collected by Google Streetview collection - Italy I think (can't find the article).

A short while back France imposed a fine for privacy breach
http://www.smh.com.a...0321-1c40a.html

People are starting to take notice (all too late) and push governments to do something.