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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="180" caption="Tinkebell"][/caption] Regarding privacy a lot of fuss is often made about the information that the government collects about this. And I must say the government collects a lot. An interesting case recently was with two criminals in the Netherlands. After stealing 21 cars they have been apprehended. The police stores every license plate in a database of every care that drives on the highway at Zwolle. It turned out that each time a stolen car drove by the same car was just behind it. This is the first time that the judge has to decide if this large database of car movements in the Netherlands can be legally used to search for clues. As for the storage of personal information we can distinguish three domains who has access to the information: the government, (networks of) companies and the Internet. As for the Government I am not that worried. I do believe that we have a strong democracy that will correct itself when information is misused too often. Of course that government may change. However, when it changes the government would start to implement a lot more means to spy on us anyway. ...

I am member of a guidance committee for Rathenau instituut in the Netherlands for a project about privacy. In this project we deal with the changing concept of privacy in our society. I talked about it some time ago in this post. It still amazes me how much people put on the net (including what I put on the Net, look at the sidebar of this Blog). In this project a special website has been developed that invites people to comment on privacy, discuss and share all kind of ideas in a creative way around this subject (the website is www.privacyproject.nl). The information on the side ranges from exhibitionists to people putting an image of their passport on the web to people completely hiding how they look in real life. In the end a television documentary will be made out of it. There is one item on the site that is I think very interesting. A colleague of mine, Rogier Brussee, has a conspiracy their for some time that Google is in fact a front for the NSA. Funny thing is if you look in the history of Google ...