Worth it?
By blog on Jan. 18, 2010.
Is security worth invasion of personal privacy? Interesting subject whichever view you take, in my opinion.
Basically, a while back I saw this news article on the BBC News site for the so called ‘naked scanner’. Basically there’s a scanner that’s being tried in various airports here in the UK which takes a complete image of a person in an x-ray sort of format. The contentiousness rises out of the fact that it produces a clear image of the entire person, regardless of clothing, as if they were naked. Some people feel that this is an extreme invasion of their personal privacy, whilst others are happy to be scanned if it means safer air travel.
I personally feel that safer air travel is worth it, because the image will be destroyed afterwards – there’s no way to store them – and I don’t think the person viewing all these pictures is going to care one bit about seeing a hazy negative looking image of thousands of people a day. The airports using the scanners are implementing them in replacement of regular metal detectors and/or being patted down, so some people do prefer to be scanned rather than go through all of that. On the other hand, it is getting to be extremely invasive to go anywhere, anymore, and making it seem less worth it to travel.
Many Brits seem to find security invasive and offensive, with many being angered by CCTV camera systems and the like, and to be fair, we do have more of them per capita than any other country in the world, and that’s pretty hefty. There’s both good and bad about all of these security measures, same with GPS vehicle tracking, but I tend to see the up side to those more than the down.
I heartily dislike this RFID tracking business that companies are trying to implement, as this is not a security measure but as a means for companies to track who’s buying what, and that I don’t agree with. It’s a viable option if it helps maintain safety for everyone, not if it only helps people to make money.
Category: life