Is Privacy necessary to Democracy?

In the Boston Marathon Bombings in 2013... the two terrorists blended in with a crowd of spectators. Police wanted to know who they were and how they planted the bomb. Police used cell phone cameras and surveillance cameras and cell phone cameras to solve the crime quickly.

I remember the public call... police wanted to see every cell phone picture taken in the area around the time of the bombing whether it was important or not. People responded by sending all of their pictures.

The police used pictures taken from personal cell phones to solve the crime and identify the terrorists.

But you are here.

True. But I try to prevent nosy people on a2k from finding out much personal information about me. I'm always careful about answering personal questions that are nobody's business.

Just speculating, Vikorr, but I would almost bet that in the next few years, cash will not be accepted anywhere. Turn it in, have it added to your personal id card, and off you go. Once every transaction can be recorded, your drones will be obsolete.

Why do you need a personal ID card? Just use your subdermal implant.

I hadn't thought of that. Way more secure for some values of 'secure'.

Yep. And as with all of your previous examples, we have no disagreement regarding your examples (except for the Nazi one).

The boston bombings were interesting. The two bombers were behaving differently from the rest of the crowd. It would be interesting if a program was written that could recognise such at major events. Currently cost & sensors would be the limiting factor at this stage as to what could be achieved. If so, when costs etc come down, it wouldnt only have to apply to such events - you should be able to program it down to shop theft behaviours as well.

It will be many years if ever before we become a cashless society. Cashless requires terminals and infrastructure - many generla members of the public currently do private sales / garage sales etc (ie. many legitimate transactions don't involve eftpos terminals). Telling them you are going to outlow such is a hard sell.

As for subdermal implants, there are already some people choosing to do this. Very few, but some.

I can get a subdermal tracking chip for my dog, but not for my teenaged daughter.

How does that make any sense?

Dogs don't have civil rights. People do - at least for now.

You can devices on ebay to duplicate microchip keys, and there are signal booster devices out there, sold by electronics shops that have been used to steal high end cars from outside of cafe's.

Hopefully you (at least) realize that my last comment was made with tongue fully implanted into cheek.

That sounds pretty poorly designed.

Part of my current project involves collecting data from millions of consumer devices. The customers register their device using their cell phone (they are kind of forced to do this, the device isn't that cool if it isn't registered on the internet).

We have a team dedicated to security (its not my team, but I talk to them and know what they are doing). Security is a big deal (for obvious reasons)... our customers trust us to properly maintain a product in their home that connects to the internet. They customers don't want to think about it, but a front page story about a data breach could destroy our business.

We hire very good security experts and use industry best practices. This includes dual-key cryptography (which in my opinion is very cool).

I am surprised the high end car companies aren't more careful.

Interesting... the signal booster attack seems to be a real story.

Good cryptographic systems use a "handshaking" procedure, they don't just use a password, one asks the other to solve a math problem that you need some hidden information to solve... the actual "password" is never sent and can't be copied.

However, the signal booster attack is what we call a "man in the middle attack". They have a device hidden where the victim is sitting, next to the real key. They have another device near the car. The these devices get the question from the car, and relay the it to the key to get the correct answer....

That is cool.

I can think of at least one way to defeat this type of attack.

Yeah, I kind of picked up on that. Of course, what you said is true.

Technically, the microchip storage of credit card details can also be stolen this way - which is problematic when it comes to contactless payments. However this sort of theft seems to be fairly rare. It was years ago I first read this particular story, so I don't know if they've since solved the issue.

I don't think you understand how the EMV chip cards work. There is no "number" to steal, it is a cryptographic conversation and the key changes each time.

You can't just copy a chip (unless you take it apart layer by layer... but I don't think that is what you are talking about).

My understanding is it was done. And there were several news articles about such. But if it can't be done, that's fine.

I was just reading about the attacks on the chip. You can't clone a chip (without taking it apart layer by layer... which isn't feasible).

They have figured out a way to trick the card into thinking that the user has already entered her PIN. But this is a way to use a stolen card without a PIN, it doesn't clone a card.

In Canada, where I live, privacy is taken so seriously, there's even a government ministry about it. You may find this interesting:

Freedom and democracy cannot exist without privacy

(Written in 2019 by Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien)