New Guidance Aims to Plug Peepholes in City Surveillance Systems
A Commerce Department standards body has released preliminary guidelines for masking the personal data of individuals captured by traffic sensors, speed cameras and other Internet-connected government systems.
Coincidentally, the publication came out the day a Spanish researcher demonstrated that any stalker can monitor the driving habits of customers patronizing dozens of European parking lots. An unnamed major provider of parking management systems allegedly has not been implementing typical security settings.
The aim of the National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines, published Friday, is to nip such mistakes in the bud by instilling "privacy engineering objectives.” A principle dubbed disassociability, or the ability to hide an individual's identity during system processing, gets at the Big Brother concern.
