I have had today’s posting under development for a few weeks now, so it was surprising to see an article in yesterday’s Toronto Star about the same subject: micro-chips for humans.

A few events have taken place over the past few weeks that can be linked with a common solution, if you will grant me a little time to connect the chain.

• First event: over the holiday weekend, my son had three entire households turned upside down in a frantic search for his passport. He had not seen it since he went to a concert in Buffalo this past winter. As it turns out, it was found in a pocket of his winter jacket [the one he wore to the concert], but not before we went through every drawer, every pocket of every suitcase and knapsack in our house, and our cottage. Luckily, he went to visit his school buddies this weekend so he could check his college apartment;
• Next event: I discovered that in the rush to load the car for the holiday weekend trip to the north, I left my wallet behind. No driver’s license. No credit cards. No debit cards.
• Final link: our dog went to the vet for a check up and annual dog license. In our area, the license fee is waived if the dog is micro-chipped. We had him ‘chipped‘ when he was a puppy. However, his chip stopped working, so we needed to get it replaced.

How do these events get tied together?

There are a number of folks in the telecom and other industries looking at the possibilities of digital wallets – whether on our cell-phones or in smarter pieces of ID [driver’s licenses, passports, etc.]. There are numerous advantages but some clear privacy challenges from such a system.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a single ID system – issued by the government – but loaded with any other commercial transaction numbers? Why couldn’t an enhanced driver’s license also serve as my passport, my credit cards, my frequent flyer card and other other number?

Scan the card, up pops my picture and biometric information for the border. Indeed, why even have a card? Perform an eye scan and know you have standing in front of you. Think of the possibilities for homeland security. Think of the benefits for medical treatment if all of your history could be accessible where ever you happen to be.

Merchants could access the credit information and be comforted that there is positive identity confirmation, lowering the cost of fraud.

Drivers? Such a system could eliminate the need for keys. Cars wouldn’t even start for drivers with suspended licenses.

But then we look at our dog’s chip that failed to remind us that such systems need to have back up procedures. Five nines [99.999% reliability] just would not be enough for such critical systems that affect every aspect of our lives.

And such an all-purpose system of identification raises the personal privacy concerns. As my friend Alan Borovoy likes to say, there should be a fundamental right, in a civilized, democratic society, for an individual to get lost. To keep to themselves. To wander around without government keeping tabs on us. Who is defining the reasonable balance of privacy considerations?

In the meantime, I’ll have to remember to pack my wallet and my son will have to find a better place to store his passport.

And we’ll make sure the dog’s micro-chip is working. Because as much as he wants to have a right to get lost, we want to get him back.

Technorati Tags:
RFID, Alan Borovoy, privacy

This afternoon’s cabinet shuffle means that there is work to be done by Ottawa’s GR firms in forging new relationships with the new portfolio holders. Senior staffers at Industry Canada will need to dust off and update the briefing packages for their new Ministers in order to get them prepared for the next session.

For those of us in the telecommunications industry, here are some initial thoughts.

The new Industry Minister, Jim Prentice, will need to get up to speed right away on spectrum auction issues. This was a file that many thought would be Minister Bernier’s to clear. There are a lot of difficult issues to examine and with a new Minister, it is likely that the Department’s timetable will now be delayed.

One of the other telecom issues that Minister Bernier had been looking at was foreign ownership restrictions. Foreign ownership, Foreign Affairs? See the link?

You do the math…

Michael Geist has further comment on the changes at Industry and Heritage. He asks “What does this mean for copyright, telecommunications, and other digital issues?“.

These changes help keep things interesting.

It has been almost a year since we filed an application with the CRTC to ask for carriers to have the authority to block certain illegal content on their networks. It has been two years since TELUS got into trouble for blocking access to a website without the permission of the CRTC.

The issues are different, but related.

Why did we go to the CRTC in the first place? The basis of our application was to seek CRTC approval under Section 36 of the Telecom Act, which states:

[Content of messages]
36. Except where the Commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public.

So, Section 36 tells us that the CRTC has the authority to intervene on content being carried and further, the Commission has to approve any control of the content that carriers handle for the public.

The Commission had never before [nor since] been asked to approve such an application, even though carriers are already blocking content identified by Cybertip as containing illegal child abuse images. We are breaking new ground on this section of the Act.

We did not ask for carriers to be ordered to block the illegal content. Simply that they be authorized to do so.

We have not dropped the issue. For the past two years, The Canadian Telecom Summit has examined Illegal Content on the Internet and we are continuing to explore both the technology and policy solutions as well as appropriate mechanisms for regulatory and judicial oversight.

Alec Saunders is a great guy, with a grin permanently etched on his face. I enjoy each chance to chat with him and lately, to engage in a blog discussion about the future of wireless spectrum.

Late last week, Alec [and likely some other readers] missed the sarcasm in the second paragraph of my August 8 posting. As a result, he accused me of pulling his leg, but in his post, I believe he is pulling mine.

Part of the problem may be that the NY Times has now placed its editorial behind its pay wall. As such, I suspect many did not see the NY Times closing paragraph and therefore didn’t understand my reference to the US wireless market as being primitive. The Times said:

The closed nature of America’s wireless networks is the main reason that its cellphone technology is so primitive compared with Europe’s and Japan’s. The F.C.C.’s new rules go part of the way to solve this, but unfortunately, American consumers have once again been denied a truly open and competitive cellular market.

Regardless of the source of the confusion, Alec wrote a paragraph worth examining further:

By not imposing use of spectrum rules, allowing consumers choice, and demanding that consumer be treated fairly by the very monopolies which they have created through their auction process, the US regulator has allowed a confusing mish-mash of technologies and anti-consumer behaviors to hold back the progress of the wireless industry. It’s ironic, given the US viewpoint that they are technology and free market leaders.

I disagree with Alec on the pejorative tone of allowing a ‘confusing mish-mash of technologies.’ It sounds like a criticism of the FCC and Industry Canada for not picking a single winner in the digital mobile technology sweepstakes.

Let’s face it. Had governments picked a videotape winner, we might all be stuck using Betamax. The free market picked VHS, not because of better picture quality, but (among other reasons) because with a 6 hour tape, one could record a whole week’s worth of soap opera episodes on a single tape. [Beta only offered a maximum of 4 hours of recording.] Consumers, faced with a choice, selected the winner.

Would GSM have been government’s first choice of digital standard?

Sure, there may have been some consumer confusion created between 3 competing technologies. But doesn’t that mean that customers saw competition and choice?

Is the software applications world any different? Competition and confusion between Windows and Linux? Firefox and Explorer? Pick the instant messenger. Name your choice of social networking service: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn. It is all so confusing.

Surely no one would argue that there should have been a single mobile wireless technology, any more than we would want to preordain a winning software application.

For the same reasons that both Alec and I want the freedom for entrepreneurs and kids to innovate and create new applications “without having to pass through the carrier’s approval process,” wouldn’t we want carriers to have the freedom to build networks that respond to the marketplace?

I’d suggest that markets are better at picking winners than governments.

How do you read the news on your Blackberry?

For that matter, how do you keep up with all the insights that I provide on this blog?

I use Viigo from Virtual Reach, an application that can be downloaded for free onto your Blackberry or many other mobile devices.

This week, Virtual Reach announced that it has added over 1,000 new channels of internet content to its Viigo Channel Library. You’ll find this blog under “Gadget and Mobile News“.

One of the easiest ways to manage your Viigo feeds is to provide access to your desktop news aggregator (such as Bloglines or My Yahoo). Viigo will then automatically add all the feeds that you see on your desktop. Alternatively, you can scan through the Viigo channel library or add feeds one at a time, either from your mobile device or from My Viigo.