Early this year a storm broke out about privacy in the United States when a computer rental company was caught spying on its customers.
Technology website Ars Technica has an excellent story describing what the company was doing and the software they were using.
What the story of PC Rental agent shows is that even small businesses have the tools to run serious surveillance on their customers and some will do so simply because they can.
The days when privacy could be dismissed as the concern for a few sensitive celebrities, sports people and politicians with something to hide are over – privacy is now your problem.
Paul,
While i do think that privacy is a concern, the ars technica isn’t about anything other than deliberate illegal surveillance. This isn’t the sort of thing that anything other than law enforcement can do anything about. If someone else owns a device we are using, they can hide monitoring etc if they choose to. For the end user the biggest issue with privacy is when we volunteer our personal information and it is misused
Thanks for the comment Martin, the issue of privacy is bigger than what we volunteer to social media sites or competitions.
What the PC Rental Agent story warns us is that anybody, including any business, can become a paparazzi and privacy issues aren’t just the concern for a small group of celebrities, football players or politicians.
As far as law enforcement goes, we really need to be careful of knee-jerk reactions as laws made in haste are poor laws but it’s quite clear that laws are coming.