The ground-based towers emit a *LOT* more. It's just that the plane is a *LOT* farther from them. 1 watt at 1 yard is the same as 1760 watts at 1 mile.

There are those who don't care and there are those who do. Doesn't really matter why, and it is unlikely those in either camp could be persuaded over to the other; nor does calling each other names really achieve anything.

The reasoned debate is
a) whether the government has the legal right to 'track' law-abiding citizens and
b) whether it has the moral right.

Just my opinion of course, but I think the Constitution is quite clear.

I suspect it's even worse than that, because the power radiates in all directions. If I'm correct, then the power at the receiving end drops with the third power of the distance. In other words, if you are 1000 times farther away, the amount of power you receive is only one billionth as much. (This is an attempt to recall physics not studied in more than 3 decades, but somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure!)

Bruce

OK, you don't mind the government tracking your flying or Safeway tracking your purchases. Obviously, others do, but I'm curious about you. Where do you draw the line? If the government wanted to track your eating, would that be OK? How about your sex life? There simply must be some point at which you say, "Enough!" Different people draw that line in different places.

Bruce

Bruce,
I have absolutely no problem with the government or anybody else tracking my eating habits. I am not breaking any food laws. I am not hiding anything in my fridge.

How about your driving habits? Or your TV watching habits? Your book reading habits? Your sleeping habits?

What does it take to tell the government to take a hike? For me, very, very little.

Sex habits/activities? If someone has nothing to hide, then there should be no complaints about that kind of monitoring, image capture and "data processing" by the community at large.

I'll play devil's advocate, here Skylady. If you're working in the private sector, the day may come when the insurance industry would be thrilled to see what kind of foods you're purchasing at your local supermarket.
The insurance industry would pay big bucks to the supermarket chains for this information, and then either (1) deny you health insurance because you
purchased foods high in fat and/or cholesterol or (2) raise your health insurance premiums dramatically. To my knowledge, this hasn't happened yet, but who knows what the future holds. Mission creep, anyone?

Such concerns are so easily remedied. Assuming any health insurance company even wants to spend the time and money collecting such data (highly doubtful), just pass a law prohibiting the practice. Problem solved.

The inevitable rebuttal is "they'll just be sneaky and violate such a law." No, they won't. It would take an unusual group of actuaries willing to risk prison time so that their employer can add a few pennies to the next quarter's earnings.

I don't have confidence that a meaningful (i.e., effective) law prohibiting such practice would pass. Those players with concentrated benefits/costs at hand will pony up the resources to try to get their way; and in the face of even popular opposition with diffuse gains/costs (including perhaps less immediate ones), the players with concentrated benefits/costs at hand will generally win. That's how things normally play out in Washington or any other center of legislative activity in a capitalistic liberal democracy. (K Street earns its money for a reason.)

In other words, easier said -- that the problem would be solved -- than done.

The insurer need not collect the data, they need only buy it from the supermarket. They then use the credit card number to get the SSN and then merge the data with their own records, assigning 'bad boy' points to certain OTC meds, tobacco, and unhealthy foods. Surprise: your insurance rates go up!

The US has no meaningful data privacy laws, making data linkage inevitable. Data linkage is the combining of information from multiple databases in order to make judgements on individuals. The problem with such linkage is that quite often the conclusions drawn will be wrong.

Examples:

*If a pregnant woman buys a carton of cigarettes for her father, all an insurer would know from purchasing the data associated from her Safeway rewards card is that she bought cigarettes: the insurer would assume they were for her own use.

*A nice Catholic girl volunteers her Friday evenings working with abused women in a bad part of town. She withdraws $50 from a nearby ATM so she has pocket money for the weekend. Looking at the location of her car from the CCTV and the cash withdrawal transaction, a cop could make the assumption she was in the neighborhood to buy drugs and have probable cause to search.

People are refused employment, housing, loans and even voting rights every day based on incorrect assumptions made by data linkage programs offered-up by data miners such as ChoicePoint and Acxiom. It is to companies such as these that TSA turned to in order to implement CAPPS II and Secure Flight. TSA wanted to use data linkage to determine whether or not to grant you permission to travel in your own country. Both programs failed because of the efforts of the privacy community to expose multiple illegal data transfers from the Feds to private data miners.

Data linkage is a problem with which people are only just becoming aware. We desperately need data privacy laws along the lines of what one finds in Germany.

And her employer could fire her.Not while the Wah on Terra is in progress, we don't

Duh, I goofed that up!

It's the square of the distance, though, not the cube.

Yeah--I've bought coffin nails for others before because I was going out and they weren't. A sufficiently sophisticated data miner would realize that very occasional purchases imply that they are for others but the data mining usually isn't that good.

Actually I would prefer a different approach. Data privacy laws just force it underground. Rather I think we should accept that such things are going to happen and instead model it more like the credit bureaus--you can get copies and have recourse to correct mistakes.

I'd go a bit farther, though, and say that *ANY* organization that collects data on an indivudal (exception: secret stuff from law enforcement) must send a copy of that data every year to you at whatever e-mail address you provide. (You register on a government website, not with each company as you might not know what company.)

Why not internationally too? Are convicts prohibited from having passports even after being released from prison/post-incarceration supervision in the US?
I assume you're being ironic.