Smart Passports- Do They Invade Privacy!

There was a news release about smart passports to be issued by the Indian Government. It is now possible to record a lot more information that can uniquely identify a person into thse smart chips used in the passports.

There has been a debat that this ammounts to invasion of privacy. On the one hand all the personal information recorded into the passport will also be available on servers somewhere in the government dungeons and it'll be easy to get at that information if security is compromised somehow. Also that anyboy with an appropriate reader possibly could read this information off the passport too.

That definitely is a difficult boundary to establish. Where does the need for unique identification end and where does the invasion of privace begin! In these days of heightened terrorist activities all over the globe the boundary possibly needs to be pushed back. Need to prevent terrorism by identifying terrorists is for the greater good. That should be the criteria to determione where this boundary move to.

Coud Computing And Privacy

Software as a services or sharing sites or whatever such facility one uses on the net can be termed under cloud computing. One common feature of this paradigm of computing is that data is stored on public data centers. Does that mean these data have a less privacy that the data on your desktop! This article brings up this interesting issue. Right now things are undefined and the general perception is that intelligence agencies or law enforcement agencies think these data are more accessible and less protected by the strict privacy environment regarding data on machines owned by you. How should these issues be tackled!

Personally, I was thinking, why shold not we apply the Swiss banking laws here. We are effectively banking our data with these agencies like the Flicr or the Salesforce.com. Unless criminal intent can be proved the privacy about the data on these data ceters should rock solid like the Swiss banks! What say you?