Public transport chip card nabs two privacy breach awards

The Big Brother Awards 2010 for the ‘worse breacher of privacy’ was awarded to Trans Link Systems (TLS), the folks who brought to you the disaster of a public transport chip card here in the Netherlands. Even the public’s choice award went to them for the double whammy. The card has been cracked every which way possible, but the makers pretend they have the situation under control, but they don’t.

From unnecessarily fingerprinting the Dutch for a passport to forcing visitors of the city of Haarlem to register their comings and goings by car with their licence plates, breaching people’s privacy in the name of safety is illegal as well as a very slippery slope. In the Netherlands, citizens’ movement Bits of Freedom continues to draw attention to these problems and has had some success.

What a weird idea: the government breaks its own privacy laws made to protect citizens in order to check whether citizens are breaking the law. That can’t be good.

(Link: nu.nl)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 11:55 am and is filed under General, IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Bits of Freedom, chip card, public transport