Last period I read a lot of articles regarding the privacy in Europe, and that we are seeing similiar things as in China. China is a dictorial regime, where a few people tell what will happen and what will not happen. A bit like Europe’s Hitler a while ago. Basically it’s the same as “democracy” in our modern western world. Only here we are being told that we choose someone and that we are stuck with them. A small group of people decide for others what is best, eventhough they are not consulted for it (or when they say an explicit “NO” to Europe’s tighter integration, they do not accept it and start all over, in a way that makes sure that the people are no longer being consulted).
Returning to the topic: Europe is filtering like China. A small group of people tell providers, based on “some” assumption that they should filter traffic to an IP address. Nobody for a fact can say that the filters are doing what they are supposed to do, or just control the way information flows. I think you can compare it with news papers being controlled so that people do not get some information (which might be damaging to the crowd/government).
The knife that is being hold to enforce this is childabuse on the internet. Presentations towards the dutch government told them that it’s very difficult to find child abuse in the first place. People doing that, and using children’s porn etc, are sophisticated people that are likely to be one step ahead of technology (heavy encryption, hiding images, secret secure servers where you only have access with a set of tokens / privileges that you must get before going further etc). So do we actually believe that we are going to stop that by having a filter? One of the things that will happen for sure is that it gets even more difficult to find these people performing these actions ( I am against Childabuse and Children’s porn ) so it’s more difficult to punish them, and never ever find it at some point. I think that’s a much worse situation then we have now, where we at least can capture a few of those guys periodically.
Filtering is out of the question. Governments seem eager to control more and better without actually seeing what impact that has in a few years.
Lets see the Dutch OV Chipkaart. This is a mifare classic chip (Yes the one that had been copied easily within a few seconds) that will provide the card holder with easy to use chips to gain access to the public transport. Not realising though is that everyone that has a chip, especially when it’s bound to your account, is traceable from beginning to end. Bye Bye privacy, you can no longer travel anonymously. Beyond that prices increase so things get more expensive, while we get told that that isn’t the case.
Dutch Public Transport is authorised to do advertisements based on the route you take, so if you travel from Rotterdam to The Hague everyday, you will get personal ad’s for that. That could lead to imbalanced credits for people that do not need them etc.
Another thing is that cars will get a GPS Transmitter from the government { which you should obviously pay for yourself } so that we can do accounting per driven KM. This will enable the government to see where all cars are, without needing to have any information at all. No more making out with your girlfriend in the forest, people will find your car easily.
Yet another item is that we will get electronic files on your hospital visits. It does not matter that external country’s already had major problems with them, saw their files being stolen, lost, used bogusly by new employers etc. How would it be when you sollicite for a job, and people read your medical file, and saw that you had the chicken pox at some point. You might get excluded for the company for just that. That’s not alright!
The reason this is such a problem, is like with the “voting machines” of recently. It’s uncontrollable. No one can see the procedures, can do a check whether it is indeed secure etc. Everything is deeply hidden within the angles of the government. Now I know that in China these things also happen, but we call them a country under “dictatorship”. It’s nothing more then stating the obvious there, while we are seeing that as well. I believe that we are heading the same way, if we aren’t there already.
