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The bins article talked about things like "Installing a sensor in the bathroom so you know which gender the person has." Not to mention they'd connect things li
by jaachan 13y ago
The bins article talked about things like "Installing a sensor in the bathroom so you know which gender the person has." Not to mention they'd connect things like which shops you visit and at what time. At any time a police officer could come along and say "We want all records you have on MAC address xx:xx". Quite a difference from websites tracking people.
The same problem exists with Google tracking - it's not that you know who's been to your site, it's that Google know every site you've been on, when you've been there, and what you did there.
- AliAdams 13y agoIf there was a good way for people to determine site visitor gender, I bet they would do that too. I realise that the data is a bit more complete when you are looking at movement on the street, so an officer taking the data would have more 'useful' information than that acquired from a user visiting a website, but that surely doesn't mean that collection of such data is wrong? It's like if an old lady sitting on a porch kept a tally of the genders of people walking down the street each hour - all you are doing is automating the old lady.
- jaachan 13y ago"All you do is automate X"? But automating means you can do things at a much larger scale. Before if you'd want to track cars on a given road, you'd need to pay a few people to write down plates. Now you can keep track of every car in every street 24/7 almost without fail. Automating is a big deal, it's not something that makes no difference.