It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

In the last few months there have been a lot of news items in the Netherlands concerning privacy. To name a few:

• the electronic passport
• the electronic patient dossier
• the OV Chip card

These things are mostly being designed with good intentions in mind, to increase security (”stop terrorists!”), to facilitate healthcare, and to facilitate public transportation respectively. In order to achieve these noble goals a lot of information about people is being recorded in there, and it becomes a lot easier to access this data.

You can argue that information such as this was already always being recorded. However, the information was never in such a form that it was so easy to process. More importantly, the data was never automatically linked to a single identity: currently, you can gather information about how many people pass through a certain station, if you try hard, you can perhaps identify and track several persons. With an electronic OV Chip card you are automatically tracked, and this data is stored and archived for some time.

While hearing news about the above things, I am growing more and more concerned about my electronic privacy. The privacy legislation in the Netherlands seems to be lagging behind the (fast) evolving technology, and also relying on self regulation. On the other hand the government is also (ab)using the new possibilities of gathering private data, for example the legislation for saving traffic data. I am also concerned that the government is not looking hard enough at the security issues involved with projects such as the electronic passport or the patient dossier.

While discussing this with friends and colleagues, I learned that I am not the only one with these kind of concerns. It is unfortunate that only last year Bits of Freedom, a big anti-privacy organisation, shut down. At the moment, I am looking into other ways to voice my concern to the right politicians, both for myself, but hopefully also as a bigger group of concerned citizens. Of course I am also going to dig deeper into the issue, and will post my findings here.

A couple of days ago we had a Mayor Referendum in Utrecht. This meant that we, the people, were asked to vote for a new mayor for our city. Well, vote is not the right word, the city counsel would have the ultimate decision, so we were asked to select a mayor. Well, select is not completely the right word, because we could only pick from two preselected candidates. And picking, that was kind of hard too, the two candidates are from the same party (Labour), they look almost the same, and they agreed on the most significant points. This lead to people painting words on the promotional material (taken by eti):

“Lood om oud ijzer”, translates literally to “Trading lead for old iron”, roughly meaning “six or half a dozen”. And when you think about it: the candidates did not even have a poster campaign of their own…

The result of the referendum was kind of predictable, only 9.25% bothered to vote in this charade, and more than 16% of those votes was either blank or invalid.

The most sad thing of this whole situation is that based on this charade, the political parties are now concluding that the people do not care, and that the referendum should be abolished. What a great way to end the national week of democracy.