Loss of Privacy

How would you like pay-as-you-go insurance?  While places such as California are pushing it, the idea doesn’t seem to be taking off elsewhere.

Such insurance plans first became available in 2004, and are now available as a limited option in 30 US states from insurance companies like Progressive and Liberty Mutual. Uptake has been slow. Abroad, things are similar; the option for PAYD insurance is available in Australia, the UK, Ontario, Japan, and South Africa, but one UK insurer has dropped its PAYD program, citing extremely limited demand.

California isn’t pleased to let such programs live and die by consumer demand. The state’s Department of Insurance has announced it plans to mandate 100% adoption of PAYD insurance beginning next year. The program requires all insurers to utilize mileage driven in determining insurance rates for all their customers, with at least eight brackets of division by mileage. Lower-mileage customers would pay reduced rates.

Let’s just force everyone to be tracked no matter where they go.  Fortunately, organizations, such as the EFF, are fighting against this.

The EFF’s complaint centers on the fine details of these provisions. Under the new plan, while insurance companies offering both EM and AMD plans may offer discounts for AMD users, they are required to accept odometer readings for milage estimates. AMD-exclusive companies, however, may mandate installation of monitoring equipment in automobiles covered under their policies.

This monitoring equipment need not restrict itself to the recording of miles driven, the EFF interprets, but may additionally record and store other information including location, speed, acceleration, usage patterns, and driving habits. Moreover, insurance companies are authorized to use information collected from such a device to calculate insurance rates, without restriction on what such information is collected. This would allow insurance companies to change rates based on an incredible variety of driver behaviors.

Get off your butts, Californians, and fight this crap before it’s completely forced upon you.

Do you have babies or toddlers in the house? Do you enjoy filming them singing or dancing to music that’s playing in the background? Well, you’re breaking the law. Warner Music’s automatic takedown list is growing by the day and more and more innocent people are getting trapped in their insidious web.

Of course we can’t show you the videos since they’re, well, censored, but the YouTomb snapshots tell most of the story. One showed a 4 year old lip-syncing to the old Foreigner hit, “Juke Box Hero.” The other apparently showed a baby smacking its lips to the tune of “I Love My Lips”—a song originally sung by a cucumber in an episode of “Veggie Tales.” Both videos are obvious fair uses (these are transformative, noncommercial videos that are not substitutes for the original songs, and there is no plausible market for “licensing” parents before they video their own children singing) and perfectly legal—just like the video of a baby dancing to a Prince song that Universal Music Group took down in 2007.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it until the folks at Warner come to their senses: it’s time to stop the censorship. The Content ID system should be set to flag possible infringing works and then Warner should have a human review those works before they are taken down.

This ridiculousness from the music companies has to stop. These are innocent children and their parents just proud of their little Johnny or Jenny and want to show the world how cute their kids are.

The EFF has updated their legal guide for bloggers.  The guide pertains only to those living in the USA.

The EFF has created a new project called, the Surveillance Self-Defense Project aimed at informing and educating the public of various laws and technologies of government surveillance.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

Read all about it on the SSD Project site.