There has been a lot of talk on the list recently about the privacy issues associated with various toll and fare collecting systems, but others have been pointing out, correctly I think, that this matters less and less because of other technological developments. New York City recently announced plans to use license plate OCR to produce and keep records of every car entering and leaving the city and to keep those records for years. Very little attention was paid to this, but I think it is the mark of things to come. Although the huge infestations of video cameras in our cities have had almost no impact on crime, once they are combined with sufficiently potent image recognition software, it will become possible to track people's movements and keep records of those movements essentially forever. It also seems to me that almost anything that can be done will in fact happen in the current "opposing the wish lists of the police is the same as being in favor of terrorism" environment. Given this, I think the time for focusing on the privacy implications of payment transponders and fare cars is over. Not carrying a cell phone will not help you avoid tracking when your environment is saturated with cameras. Digital cash toll collection systems will not avoid records being kept of your car's movements when cameras are reading and recording license plates anyway. Unfortunately, I don't see anything technological that people can reasonably do here to provide more privacy, at least short of everyone going everywhere on foot while wearing a burqa and periodically attempting to confuse the cameras. The solutions, if any exist at all, appear to be non-technical. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE