The 2005 annual report of Canada’s Privacy Commissioner contains a full section on RFID (radio frequency identification) issues, but appears to be silent on location-based cellular services. You could say that the Privacy Commissioner’s fixations with RFID tracking are off-track.

RFID tagging dramatically extends the number of items that may allow our lives and behaviors to be tracked. There are real privacy concerns. But there are many more technologies that should be viewed as clear and present dangers, not the subject of a study to prepare for future world.

For example, the Privacy Commissioner’s RFID fact sheet speaks about situations, such as:

The Airmiles program, as well as many other loyalty programs, know the kind of alchohol I buy, to accompany groceries and pharmaceutical products I purchased. RFID will allow them to know which particular bottle of Spanish Rioja I bought, but the brand and vintage is likely all that is needed to build a profile, not the individual tag. Couple that information with my location and the concerns of the Privacy Commissioner are realized. These are present dangers.

Should the RFID-type guidelines be applicable to my cell phone? Each cell phone has a unique identifier and can be associated with its owner. Rather than dealing with a hypothetical future world that may combine Global Positioning Systems (‘GPS’) with RFID, there are guidelines and rules needed to deal with the existing combinations of mobile GPS and AGPS tracking, data collection and reporting.

We need serious discussions to focus on privacy issues with the current deployment of location based services. It is one thing to track our teenagers when they are out in the family fun-wagon on Saturday evening. But that information means that other people could also access the same data to know where that car is sitting, how fast it is travelling – perhaps issue speeding tickets based on such information.

Add GPS and AGPS to cel phones and we can track where anyone is located and who is assembled with them. There are real issues to be examined, such as: who has the ability to disable tracking; and, should it be able to be turned on remotely to help in search and recovery?

Numerous policy questions arise that need to balance convenient consumer features, commercial services, public safety and personal privacy concerns. These are difficult issues that have implications for technology development.

The Privacy Commissioner has already found that there are limits to her extra-territorial powers – the ability to pursue cases outside of Canada. We need rules for these technologies and privacy solutions that ensure that Canadians are protected from threats, both within and outside our borders.

Blogs, like most of the web, are a ‘pull’ technology. You visit the site in order to pull down and read the content.

Part of the initial success of the Blackberry was its ‘push’ technology. New messages were automatically sent to the device. Newspapers and magazines are most successful when pushed to their readers. Publishers prefer to have readers subscribe and readers like the convenience of having their favourite content arrive at their doorstep.

Hence the availability of RSS: Really Simple Syndication to feed blogs to regular readers.

The Blackberry is good at reading messages but it is not noted for web browsing (or floating, but that is another entry). So, what do you do to read Telecom Trends or any other RSS feed when you are on the go?

The answer is Newsclip, from Virtual Reach – a really useful reader of really simple syndication. Any RSS feed. Check them out. Virtual Reach has entered into a distribution agreement with Rogers although Newsclip is also available for any Blackberry and many other devices on any network.

The CTO, and one of the founders of Virtual Reach, Jay Steele, will be speaking on the Mobile Applications panel at The Canadian Telecom Summit on June 12.

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Disclosure: The president of Virtual Reach is my brother Brian. He has overcome the unfortunate handicap of being born after me.

This marks my 150th posting as a blogger.

From what I have seen in my first few months of blogging, the medium is interesting and I enjoy the challenge of trying to generate stimulating thoughts on a regular basis.

I find blogging to be an interesting transformation from newsletters; still, I don’t see blogs replacing mainstream media yet. With Technorati tracking more than 1.2M blogs and growing, there’s just too much filtration needed for the average reader.

Mark Evans writes about the challenge in defining who is a journalist – and he considerately mentions the challenge for conference organizers in deciding who gets free media access. Notwithstanding a US court ruling that some interpret to the contrary, I think it is possible to distinguish between the riff-raff and journalists.

Even top bloggers digress into items better suited for intimate diaries with frequent off-topic personal issues. That kind of writing may be fine for sites targeted for friends or family but seems to be a practice that will chase away non-voyeuristic subscribers.

How will readers find diverse, trustworthy sources of material worth reading? Blog ranking services are based on various measures of popularity, hardly a scientific measure. Massive blog rolls on some sites appear to be tactics simply to increase rankings for search engines.

Thoughtful analysis, and stories worth reading. That is what our choice of newspapers deliver, whether it is broadsheet or tabloid, daily, weekly or monthly.

Newspapers and magazines present a somewhat more authoritative voice, conforming to at least a modicum of journalistic ethics and with varying degrees of political bias to match the desires of their target audience. The traditional media have editors that help filter the journalists – in effect imposing responsibilities to justify their journalistic freedoms.

Until someone develops a Brita for bloggers, to paraphrase a line from Finding Forrester, I’ll continue to read the National Post and its kind for dinner and save the blogs for dessert.

It seems to me that many folks in our sector are sometimes guilty of extrapolating trends from too few data points.

We want to watch how our kids are using tools like instant messaging and file-sharing and gaming and social networking. But we need to keep next generation services really simple or really, really useful so they will actually migrate beyond the inner sanctum of ‘early adopters’ and hit the mainstream.

For example, Skype is an interesting application that is pulling away long distance revenues, but it isn’t replacing the telephone. I can’t use Skype while I’m cooking in the kitchen.

Go ahead and write to tell me how you have blue tooth ear-buds and set up your multi-media, Linux enabled home. That proves the point. The concern is what I call the Iridium syndrome: doing stuff because you can, regardless of the merits of the business case.

Like Jeff Pulver suggesting that American Idol should migrate from broadcast TV to the web. Sure, just tell the 58% of Americans without broadband service that we don’t care if they can’t watch; Jeff wants to broadcast American Idol that way to “create a tidal wave of epic proportions for other shows to follow”.

It sounds more like Iridium all over again.

It isn’t just Barrett Xplore that is deploying a combination of satellite and WiMax to deliver broadband to tame the wild frontier.

AT&T; has announced that they are going to pursue a similar architecture, which provides a major vote of confidence to what John Maduri and his team are doing.

What is troubling to me is that everyone seems to be convinced that we need to follow the great Canadian tradition of government subsidies and handouts in order to push broadband to the masses. Everyone other than Barrett Xplore itself, which has been executing its business plan using its own money.

So, when Barrett has launched a Cabinet appeal to fight against the CRTC Decision telling Bell to provide rural highspeed service using cash from the Deferral Account. Bell says it isn’t a subsidy. In their words, it is simply topping up the business case…

Among many other items, we’ll be watching this unfold. Community broadband networks are being discussed at The Canadian Telecom Summit in two weeks.

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Update: Tyler Hamilton has commentary on this issue in today’s Toronto Star: Telcos don’t deserve your $620M