I’ve recently published an article on the issues surrounding biometric data that will be included in the new Ontario drivers licenses that will be available beginning in 2009. This is intended to complement my earlier piece where I discussed concerns that are raised by the radio identifier that will be inserted in the licenses.
Article – Driving Your Liberties Away: Biometrics and ‘Enhanced’ Drivers Licenses
Posted in EDL
Leave a comment
Site Overhaul
An administrative note: I’ve overhauled the general structure of my web space. I’m starting to use wordpress as a semi-content management system, and I’m actually pretty pleased with what I’m seeing now. If you find that something is broken, or just want to comment on if you love/hate the look, let me know.
Posted in Administration
Leave a comment
Abandoning Your Privacy, One Radio Wave, One Smile, at a Time
In a recent piece, “Tracking Your Every Move: ‘Enhancing’ Driver’s Licenses at the Cost of Privacy,” I noted that the proposed Ontario enhanced drivers license changes threaten to seriously diminish people’s privacy. These proposed licenses will include a small RFID chip that emits a unique identifier when brought into proximity of a reader – this number is not associated with any personally identifiable information that the provincial government holds, but does (per the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada) constitute personally identifiable information in its own right. The Commissioner’s office, in their whitepaper entitled “Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the Workplace: Recommendations for Good Practices”:
An RFID tag containing a unique identifier has the potential to become a “proxy” for an individual when it becomes associated with that individual. In such circumstances, it will become personal information. This would be the case with an RFID-enabled identification badge or uniform. Location data gathered by scanning tags associated with individuals is also personal information (Source). Continue reading
Posted in EDL, Privacy, Technology
Leave a comment
Bell Mobility and Solo Mobile make mobile Internet access safer
This is going to be relatively brief, just given a lack of time on my part (who knew that take 4 grad courses in a term, plus doing personal research, would be so time intensive *grin*). After reading a post by Mark Goldberg over at Telecom Trends I found out that Bell is planning to provide parents with a feature that would let them limit web content that their kids could view online. Given Bell’s history of using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to shape bandwidth use, I wanted to see what the technology they were using to prevent children from accessing particular websites.
The Technology
Bell is investing in Unipier Ltd.’s Intelligent Policy Manager (IPM). From the whitepaper (links to .pdf) on this particular piece of technology, we find that:
The Intelligent Policy Manager communicates with traffic and content interception and enforcement systems such as: IP level deep packet inspection systems, HTTP and SIP proxies, messaging gateways and 3rd party access gateways. Using these systems to
forward events to the IPM, allows it to apply policies on these events. In addition, the IPM integrates with various networks, BSS and content enablers in order to carry out specific actions such as: charging, sending messages or reformatting a piece of content.
Unipier’s IPM also integrates with back-end subscriber, partner and device repositories in order to fetch relevant context information. Continue reading
Posted in Internet, Privacy, Technology
Leave a comment
