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Call Off The Dogs!
Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Wednesday, October 19 @ 14:03:02 EDT Privacy
Panic and more panic seems to have followed EFF's announcement that yellow dots track a printer's serial number, date, and time from a color print-out. Even Declan, who I rarely consider an alarmist, is concerned for religious pamphleteers' privacy. This is ridiculous.

Nobody is using this information to track down political/religious speakers. If the big, bad government were, EFF would already know about it, I am sure.

 
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Re: Call Off The Dogs! (Score: 1)
by phulshof on Thursday, October 20 @ 07:53:35 EDT
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That's exactly right: it should be removed. It doesn't appear to be used by anyone for legitimate purposes, but might be abused by a future government. As such, this feature has no business being in the printer that I purchase.



Re: Call Off The Dogs! (Score: 1)
by mako (mako@atdot.cc) on Saturday, October 22 @ 15:20:46 EDT
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It might be that the most privacy invasive bits of the patriot act are used for fighting terrorism. It might be that the clipper chip would be used to spy on "real criminals" committing "real crimes." It might be that DRM and all sorts of watermarking is used primarily to cut down on piracy and counterfeiting.

But I'm not willing to give up my privacy because there hasn't been abuse yet and I'm not willing to give up my privacy in every situation that there might be a substantial legimiate purpose to do so.

There are many ways to fight counterfeiting that do it involve building in the potential for government, or others, to track every color document from everyone -- the vast majority of whom will not be counterfeiters. Once we've proven that those are ineffective, we can start talking about the necessity to give up important freedom in this way.




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