Re: Smart cards "a giant leap backwards" - Canadian Privacy Commissioner

[shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)]

At 11:12 7/31/96, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>At 02:23 PM 7/30/96 -0400, Richard Martin wrote:
>>Very little that might be new or enlightening to the world; attendees
>>of CFP '96 will remember [fuzzily, in my case] the closest thing to
>>Bruce's counterpart in the states admitting that the USA doesn't actually
>>have much of a counterpart to the privacy commissioner.
>
>Most Central European countries have both privacy commissioners and legal
>requirements that everyone register their addresses with the police.  I'll
>do without the former if I can also avoid the latter.

I remember a time when Privacy Commissioners were a new thing. Their
primary purpose seemed to be to sanction government access to (and keeping
of) large databases on the activities of the population. Their secondary
purpose was to prevent the private sector competition from doing the same.
Eliminating access to such data by the individual in the process.

Things may have changed for the better, but I doubt it.


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