June 22nd, 2005
111936399108954621
Indiscretions, privacy, and things not to Google for at work
Since my old cellphone is just about to be taken off of life support, I’ve given up hope of retrieving my precious data from its oxidized circuitry. The number of people I can’t get information via second or third degree numbers is quite few, so to make the best of it I decided to request a call log for the last month. If I remember correctly, this sort of information comes standard with monthly telephone bills in the US. However, here you have to pay a dollar and jump through some hoops, and it was a pain until I understood why.
There was a story, not urban myth, fact about a man who received a speeding ticket on the highway via one of the government’s placed monitoring cameras. Cameras such as these would photograph cars that moved between points A and B under a within a certain time period deemed speeding, such that their license plates could be used as proof in court to uphold the accusation. However, this particular man happened to be in a convertible with a female “friend” who was not his wife, and the photograph was mailed to his home along with the ticket, evidence towards the inevitability that he needed to cough up the cash. Of course the wife opened the mail and saw the photograph, so the man got into trouble worth considerably much more than a few hundred dollars. Ergo for the invasion of his “privacy”, the man sued the government, got the ticket overturned and may or may not have exacted an additional settlement (possibly equivalent to a set of monthly alimony payments).
So this set a precedent, and henceforth all those fancy highway cameras made specifically for catching speeders were obviated and inadmissible. To put it succinctly, Japan is a country that (like the France) greatly respects a person’s personal privacy. This is nice if you’re the man in the convertible, but it’s a pain in the ass if you’re taking photographs of buildings at a university (as I am wont to do), and there’s the chance people could end up in them. Privacy is an incredibly big deal here when it comes to personally identifying information, and so this week’s gauntlet to obtain my own data involves a mailed consent form with my custom sigil, and copy of my ID, just so I can get the number of a friend I called last Tuesday. Privacy legislation: good for affairs, bad for artists.
I’m not sure why, I can’t even remember where it’s from, but the phrase “cock gobblers” jumped into my mind yesterday. I think I was playing the Oracle of Bacon in the IMDb with Seann William Scott. Anyway, I got halfway to opening a new tab in Firefox at which point I realized the rain of pop-unders, etc. I’d bring down on myself in the already uncomfortable atmosphere of work, and thought better of it.
[Though not falling on anyone's Oscar list, I have always found Intersection to be an satisfingly well done film for its cinematography, Mercedes, rainy mountain roads, and Richard Gere. (Who's a really big deal here.)]
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