Loss of Privacy

Starting next month, an Australian shopping center will begin tracking customers in their malls, a move that has prompted privacy concerns and an investigation.

One unnamed Queensland shopping centre is next month due to become the first in the nation to fit receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two metres.

Path Intelligence national sales manager Kerry Baddeley stressed that no mobile phone user names or numbers could be accessed.

“All we do is log the movement of a phone around an area and aggregate this to provide trend data for businesses,” she said.

“It’s much less intrusive or invasive than existing people-counting methods, for instance CCTV cameras and number plate monitoring.”

Except for the fact that, when you are shopping in a mall, no one is checking your number plate inside the store. While number plate monitoring has its own problems, it is generally accessing that data to look for crimes. CCTV is also not able to clearly identify a person and there are means to hide your identity from the camera. It is also, typically, passively monitoring a person’s movement and, theoretically, only tracking you when you have done something suspicious.

Australian Privacy Foundation chairman Dr Roger Clarke said emerging retail tracking techniques were “seriously creepy” and should be thoroughly investigated.

Some shops are already using image-monitoring to log customers’ movements, how long they stop in front of products, and whether they are male or female.

Federal Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said the Privacy Act applied only if the information collected identified individuals.

Ms Baddeley said mobile phone monitoring, already operating in the UK and US, would help the struggling retail sector develop marketing campaigns and identify the best mix of shops in centres.

Just because others are doing it, doesn’t make it right. A person who has a cell phone has no ability to opt out of said tracking while shopping. The only thing a person can do is not shop there or leave their cell phone at home so that they are not tracked.

She said receivers attached to walls picked up phone transmissions. Data was then fed via the internet to computer servers to create weekly reports outlining popular customer routes and visitors’ length of stay.

And while they claim that they cannot track or identify a person, if that person shops in the mall, or several malls, their unique ID on their cell phone will, indeed, identify exactly who they are.

Questions remain about the legality of such a system. Australia’s Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 states that

A person shall not:
(a) intercept;
(b) authorize, suffer or permit another person to intercept; or
(c) do any act or thing that will enable him or her or another person to intercept;
a communication passing over a telecommunications system.

Furthermore, communication is defined as:

“communication” includes conversation and a message, and any part of a conversation or message, whether:

(a) in the form of: (i) speech, music or other sounds;(ii) data;(iii) text;(iv) visual images, whether or not animated; or (v) signals; or (b) in any other form or in any combination of forms.

The signal is intercepted because the device being used here has to gather/intercept the signal. As defined in Australian law, the device that is to be used in malls is intercepting signals that are sent over a telecommunications system, which is illegal. However, it appears that there is a bypass to this law because they are only using radio communications.

Considering the fact that malls also have CCTV, it wouldn’t take much to track and identify a person shopping. The best advice is, stop visiting malls and, if you must shop at a mall, pay with cash and leave your cell phone home or take out the battery before you get anywhere near the mall as they can track you outside in the parking lot too.

If a New South Wales police officer suspects a person of a crime, they now have the power to remove a person’s head covering in order to confirm their identity.

NSW Muslim organisations have largely welcomed the new laws, but civil libertarians have criticised them for giving unnecessary powers to police.

Mr O’Farrell announced late yesterday that cabinet had approved laws allowing police to direct people to remove coverings, including veils and motorcycle helmets, if they had reasonable grounds for suspecting breaches of security may occur, or breaches of the law had occurred.

The laws come after the high-profile case of the Muslim woman Carnita Matthews, who successfully appealed against her conviction for falsely accusing a police officer of trying to rip off her veil. The judge found there was not enough evidence Mrs Matthews had made the statutory declaration accusing the officer.

Basically, Carnita Matthews was let go because there was no good way to actually identify her. The case stems from the video below.

View this footage and judge for yourself. Did the police officer try to lift Muslim Carnita Matthew’s burqa? Was he being racist?

I think, in this case, the police officer was extremely patient. I don’t think I could have been as polite or patient with this woman.

Quietly, the New South Wales government in Australia has been collecting data on its citizens with the goal being a compilation of every person’s face in the country. The need for such a system is argued to be so that every CCTV camera can recognize an individual as soon as they are captured on CCTV.

Experts said yesterday few people realised their facial features were being recorded in an RTA database of drivers licence photos that the Government has allowed both state and federal police to access

The federal body CrimTrac has asked NSW for its database so it can be mined nationally by police using the facial recognition information contained in it.

Problems will arise from such a monumental undertaking as facial recognition is not anywhere near 100% accuracy.

University experts in facial recognition said the correct match rate was as low as 90 per cent, meaning the names of people with faces sharing a similar structure to criminals could be returned in searches.

Dr Carolyn Semmler from the University of Adelaide said police wanted to eventually use facial recognition in smart CCTV cameras allowing people to be tracked anywhere there was a camera.

While some may say that they don’t care if their information is collected so long as it prevents crime, a 90% accuracy rate is not good enough. This means that in large cities, such as London, up to 3000 people per day are wrongly identified. Will you still understand when the police barge in your house at 3am and make you and your children lie face down on the floor because you’ve been pegged as a pedophile, rapist, drug dealer or terrorist?

NSW Opposition police spokesman Mike Gallacher said most people were unaware their face had been mapped when they applied for or had their licences renewed, allowing them to potentially be tracked.

There is a fundamental problem with the government when they freely invade people’s privacy and then neglect to tell them that it is even happening. The RTA has been compiling this new database since last December, meaning that anyone who has renewed their license in that time has had their facial features mapped and placed into the database.

While this is being done in the name of national security and the prevention of using driver’s licenses fraudulently, it is a huge invasion of privacy. Before removing residents’ civil liberties, there should have been debate and discussion. Instead, the New South Wales government felt it necessary to not inform anyone of what was occurring. This is, most likely, because no one would have wanted it.

Couple the facial recognition to CCTV with the GO card, and ANPR and you’ve got a very nice system that can personally track you every single step of your day. Everyone hopes that none of this technology will be abused, however, we’ve seen time and again that it can and is on a regular basis.

I don’t intentionally break the law. I do everything possible to preserve my privacy, but being tracked and misidentified is not something I can control. I cannot trust those with the power to not abuse it, leaving me with the only recourse possible. Everyone needs to write to their MPs now while there’s still a chance to change things.

Submission #1931 [Word doc] at the Australian Human Rights Commission is a proposal by the Australian branch of Scientology that aims to eliminate anonymity on the internet and the removal of critical websites.

The main focus of the proposal is the group, Anonymous, whom Scientology believes are out to destroy them.  Again and again, the proposal lists Anonymous as the target in unmasking their identities.  The summary of recommendations in the proposal are as follows;

Recommendation 1: The implementation of Criminal and Civil Restrictions on Religious Vilification.

Recommendation 2: Restriction on Anonymity on acts of Religious Vilification: 2.1 Websites created with primary purpose of inciting religious vilification shall be removed or their access to the Australian public restricted. 2.2 Creators of websites whose primary purpose is the incitement of religious vilification shall be prevented from concealing their identity.

Recommendation 3: Restriction on Religious Misinformation and Misrepresentation known or reasonably known to be untruthful in the Media

Recommendation 4: Include a form of Bill or Charter of Rights into the Australian Constitution, which prevents the Commonwealth from making any law, which ‘directly, indirectly or incidentally’ prohibits the free exercise of religion to the extent of such prohibition.”

While anyone can submit proposals it should be noted that the Church of Scientology is a group that relies heavily on peer pressure and has vast amounts of money to use against anyone who would consider speaking out against said group.  The proposal is the Church of Scientology’s desire to strip anonymity in order to more readily silence dissent.  This would eliminate the task of going through the courts to find out a person’s identity.

Scientology is not amused that people can criticize their beliefs and is asking the Australian government to do their job for them.  If Scientology wants to find out who is criticizing them, they should go through the already established legal channels to do so.  They should not expect governments to participate in helping a “religion” find dissenters.

If you have the guts to post one of the hyperlinks on Australia’s banned list, the Australian communications regulator says they will fine you AU$11,000.  Wikileaks, whom the Australian communications regulator hates so much, has several pages of their site listed due to Australia being unhappy with them for posting Denmark’s banned sites list.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA – an anti-abortion website.

Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government’s censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

“The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship,” Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.

The site has also published Thailand’s internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

Here again, we have sites being added to the blacklists that should not be and the public isn’t supposed to know what sites are blacklisted.  It is commonly known that this type of censorship is begun by claiming to be “saving the children,” but it quickly descends to stifle free speech and anything else a government doesn’t want its people to talk of or be informed about.   Australian Christian Lobby, Jim Wallace, has already stated, on the record, that he hopes the porn industry will go broke as a result of the blacklist.  This entire scheme is politically motivated and has little to do with actually protecting the citizens of Australia.

Australia, like many other countries, already have laws to combat child pornography and anything else that is illegal online.  There is no need to have this blacklist to being with.  Child porn is not so rampant that children are being bombarded with it everywhere they turn when they are online.  Child porn and illegal activities online are something that people, including children, have to seek out.  It doesn’t come knocking at your door.