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My name is Ancilla and starting 2014 I will be hosting a new series on technology.
For this purpose, I spoke to scientist Matthijs Pontier and investigative journalist Brenno de Winter.
This little preview was made especially for Defember. Enjoy.
Brenno de Winter – investigative journalist – field of interest: technology – journalist of the year 2011
This little machine serves a lot of purposes, doesn’t it?
Indeed. That’s a Near Field Communication card reader. It creates a small magnetic field, used to read cards like these.
So it’s an RFID device? They put that in a lot of products nowadays, don’t they?
- Yes. Whenever you buy something at a store, chances are there’s an RFID chip on the product you buy.
So what are we talking here? Perfume? Cornflakes? - Anything. They’re used willy-nilly, in every place imaginable.
Let’s talk about these RFID chips people seem to be carrying around more and more often, like on their phones. Are they abused in any way in everyday life? What are they used for?
- That depends on your definition of “abuse”. For instance, they are used in stores. Using the chip in your phone, they track your movement throughout the store.
Then, they use the information they gather to decide how to arrange the store in order to sell as many products as possible.
They’re even in your passport. If you travel to the UK, they use card readers to read the chip in your passport and moments later your personal information is in the United Kingdom. Photo and everything. That’s not how it used to be.
- It used to be that you would just show your passport to prove you had a right to travel to other countries. They didn’t need to know more.
Exactly. Nowadays, they obviously keep much more detailed records. Even if I get my hands on your passport for a brief moment, I can use my phone to get any information I need from it.
And this is monitored badly. For over a year, I experimented with a fake I.D and nobody noticed. I gained access to ministries, the Royal House, you name it. The most heavily secured places in the Netherlands, nobody even gave it a second look.
The Dutch coordination in the defense against terrorism got wind of it, little did he know I visited them with a fake I.D. months before that.
All these administrations and governments claim to be protecting our personal data…I doubt them. A lot. As we all know, governments and ICT isn’t exactly a match made in heaven.
Profiling. Everything you can get to know about a person without their permission. How does that work?
Using a lot of information from different kinds of sources, a “risk profile” is made. At this moment, it’s used for personal ads.
Companies try and survey whether or not a person is interested in the product they’re trying to sell. Or the government uses it to judge whether or not a person has criminal tendencies.
Isn’t that a sort of pre-crime? - That’s exactly what it is.
So what do they do with that information?
They judge you. Based on the information they decide who to monitor, who gets the fast lane at airports and who has to be double-checked, and so on.
People who voluntarily share their personal information get to queue in the fast lane, people who don’t get the slow one. So they try to make it worth your while to share your information, so people are more willing to do it.
Take car insurers, for instance. They ask you to share your GPS information with them so in case of an accident, they can check if it was caused by your reckless driving.
People who are convinced of their driving skills are willing to share that information in exchange for a lower monthly fee.
What people don’t realize is that the company now has information on where you went at what time, and maybe even share that information with others.
- Sensitive personal information is being monitored in a lot of places. For instance, Personal Health Records. Health insurance companies are deciding on what information is exchanged between doctors and specialists.
I am researching in what cases companies are trying to gain access to PHRs. Some companies even refuse to pay up if they are refused access to the files.
Is that legal? – No, it’s not. But as a healthcare institution, can you risk saying no?
In a lot of places, a lot of people are trying to gain access to our personal information. All the time. This way, the whole principle of insurance is being ridiculed. It started out as a collective thing, looking out for each other, paying for each other in case of illness.
Nowadays, insurance companies become more and more individualistic. They even go so far as to monitor eating habits and judging people on that… there’s always a reason to exclude people.
And that’s not the core principle of insurance. Everything has to be monitored. There’s no way of knowing whether or not you actually are the vegetarian as you claim to be.
How do they know this?
It comes down to using some sort of monitoring. Otherwise, they don’t know. The whole society is changing: we go from being able to trust each other to not trusting anyone until compelling evidence is provided.
Profiling is, in a way, discrimination. Based on what are those profiles being made? I would like to see revealed what aspects are taken into account when it comes to profiling. That way it can be discussed in a transparent way, so no discrimination on origin will take place.
What kind of society do you want to live in? The kind of society where you fear that when you dance in the streets, it will be recorded and added to your profile?
That means you can’t be creative anymore, because if you dare to be you show deviant behavior. And deviant behavior is flagged in the system. So the system takes charge instead of the human mind. This is disturbing to me.
I want to be able to make my own choices on whether or not something is acceptable. - But what if you have nothing to hide?
Doesn’t matter. They don’t have the right to follow me. If out of every five people four claim to have nothing to hide, the fifth person is flagged. That being a problem depends on what kind of government will be dealing with that. So it’s complicated.
I don’t know what startles the American government. What I do know is that I will be deported to the U.S. if that ruling is not in my favor.
We’re heading towards being a surveillance state. I watched a lot of eveluations on camera use and found out that it actually doesn’t work too well.
It isn’t getting any safer, but people think it is. So they may feel safer, but it costs a lot of money and the chances that someone will be tracked down through facial recognition are slim.
Also, the system could be used not only to capture criminals, but also to monitor other people’s whereabouts.
Governments put so much trust in modern technology, they aren’t thinking about other possibilities or look any further. So we’re going to see the day someone innocent will be sentenced. This will happen.
Thanks for watching. #TECH will start in 2014 and I will be investigating how safe your data is. See you then.