The Dead Horse in the Middle of the Room
In the course of researching an upcoming RFID privacy article, I spoke with Glover T. Ferguson, chief scientist at Accenture. He made this rather interesting point about privacy. I'd have liked to include his remark, but it was slightly off-topic and the story was already running long. So now it's here.
Ferguson: If you get into a discussion with people about privacy, there's a dead horse in the middle of the room that everyone steps over while making impassioned arguments over the inherent right to privacy. The big dead horse in the middle of the room that nobody really wants to discuss is the number of places in their lives where they might be living just outside the law. People who like to drive slightly faster than the speed limit. People who take "aggressive" positions on their taxes. All the little tiny things that you might get stopped for or you might not...suddenly it becomes clear that you could get stopped for each and every one of them. Nobody wants to say, "I'm breaking the law in these five areas and frankly I don't want to be caught." They say, "This is evil, this is Satanic, or this is intrusive government." When in fact we have laws that maybe we want to loosen up.
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