Privacy

As land lines begin to fade into the past and more and more people are opting to have their only phone numbers be mobile and/or VOIP lines, the call to create an official registration of those numbers – a mobile white pages – grows.  So far this year, we have a cautionary tale on this practice coming to us from Mexico.

On Mondays I offer comments on some   of the most interesting information technology stories that I have found on the web that week.  Please feel free to join in the discussion or suggest other stories.

Today’s comments were generated after I read a UPI.com International story.  Give it a read below.

UPI.com – Mexicans’ worse cellphone fears come true

“Private data of millions of Mexicans who had registered their cellphones with the government showed up for sale in a Mexico City flea market, officials said.

The registration program, meant to combat rampant telephone extortion rackets and drug-related kidnapping attempts, backfired when data from official state registries ended up for sale for a few thousand dollars at the Tepito flea market…”

There is not a lot new in this story, I admit, but it is none the less, a major governmental example of good intentions gone bad.  If your country has an established crime culture that uses cell phone to track targets for kidnapping and thrives on disposable cells to form the command and control for a drug trade, it seems very logical to pass a law requiring cell phone number registration.  The only problem is that believing that you could protect the security and piracy of that registry against a better armed, financed, and motivated foe — those same crime syndicates is folly.  Unfortunately, we see this same narcissistic and overconfident approach taken to Information Age digital challenges all over the world.  Three-strikes laws, digital rights management, and challenging requirements to get  smart IDs are all misguided solutions that really only serve to make law abiding people work harder and risk more loss of control in order to supposedly combat criminals who can and will circumvent the new measures.  In this case, it is now actually worse because in one fell swoop the government created a partial database that can actually help those criminals by ruling out known numbers of no interest from the limited pool of total numbers available. 

The problems are real.  The solutions are inadequate.  The challenge remains.  The cautionary tale is valid.

What do you think about this topic?  Do you agree or disagree with me? Do you have a recommended news story for next week? Please share your ideas below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for May 17, 2010  by Scott Coughlin.

Image Credit: Voice Nation