Trust Me

Okay, raise your hand if you trust the government or corporate America.

Seriously, we joke about the corruption of our political leaders & "captains of industry", but do we really feel that way? Are they really not to be trusted, or are we just kidding around? Realizing the kinds of private information that are being asked of us, we might want to give it a little more thought.

Not all of these stories are about the U.S., but hey, let's not be isolationists. It is a New Global Order after all. I'll let them do the talking today:

Genetic mapping of babies by 2019 will transform preventive medicine
Every baby born a decade from now will have its genetic code mapped at birth, the head of the world's leading genome sequencing company has predicted.

Personal genome sequencing, however, will raise legitimate concerns about privacy, “Bad things can be done with the genome. It could predict something about someone — and you could potentially hand information to their employer or their insurance company,” said Dr Flatley. “Legislation has to be passed.”

Complete genetic privacy, however, was unlikely to be possible, he added. “People have to recognise that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can't be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind.”


Mexico 'to fingerprint all mobile phone users'
Under a new law published on Monday and due to be in force in April, mobile phone companies will have a year to build up a database of their clients, complete with fingerprints. The idea would be to match calls and messages to the phones' owners.

The register, detailed in the government's official gazette, means new subscribers will now be fingerprinted when they buy a handset or phone contract.


Sure, the Googlebots know your deepest secrets - but it's worth it
I use Googlemail for my e-mail. As is the case for millions of others, it is the hub of my online existence.

I have just sent myself an e-mail saying that I wanted to buy a new bed. Within four minutes this link appeared in the small ad box at the top of my inbox: Tempur-Pedic Mattress Sale: Get Free Delivery, Free Pillows, No Tax & Much More.

What has happened is that Google has digitally "crawled" my inbox, noted that I was writing about beds, and sent me a targeted advert. To some this is very scary. Google knows what I am writing about all the time. In theory, it knows that I have just been to the doctor for a check-up.

I have made peace with myself over Google's "invasion of my privacy" because of the service it provides.


Google is watching
'THERE was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . . It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time."

That quote from George Orwell's "1984" becomes increasingly prescient in light of developments in eavesdropping, pioneered by Google. Recently the company launched a service called Latitude, which allows consenting users to monitor each other's whereabouts. It's the company's latest snooping tool, the most controversial being the Street Views photographic mapping service.

When I tried Street Views by entering my address, I was surprised to see that with a single click a truly Orwellian image popped onto the screen: my house, my car, the newspaper in the driveway. I could zoom in for a clear view of the open window on the second floor and the handy drain pipe that potential burglars might use to reach that window when no one was home.

Existing law makes distinctions between public property and private property; between public figures and private individuals. Yet in the Google Universe, these boundaries become fuzzy.


"Fuzzy boundaries". Nice. I have to believe that you can do just about anything when you have fuzzy boundaries. And if something can be done, history has shown that it probably will be.

Good thing we trust these people.