Article: They've got your number

Today's Montreal Gazette has a good and long article discussing privacy issues, from black boxes in vehicles to RFID technology:

They've got your number: Cutting-edge technologies work as tattle-tales for a surveillance-minded state, Canadian privacy advocates warn:

"RFIDs, like other technology, can be misused, Stoddart says. If it is used to track people or if it transmits personal information, those practices would come under applicable provincial and federal legislation, she says.

People have to be notified that RFIDs are attached to products they may buy, allowing them to refuse them or disable them so they don't collect or transmit personal information.

'What concerns me most is the fact that if we don't act fairly soon to have a public debate, a public awareness and discussion of (RFIDs and other potential invasive technologies), they may soon become ubiquitous and then lower our general societal expectation of privacy at a time when, due to the international situation, we already have great pressures on privacy,' Stoddart says.

Her office is in the process of designing a public education program on privacy issues that may be launched this winter."

Full text here ... (beware, Canada.com expires their content pretty quickly).