Originally Posted by Maegs

What about those of us who enjoy not having Big Brother watching all the time? It's not about an irrational fear, but about a principle, about the idea that we should be able to live without being scrutinized and watched.

thank you for proving my point.

I seriously hope you were joking but I will facepalm just in-case.


What do you think everyone around you does every second of every day you are out in public. They watch you. They judge you. They make assumptions about you. You are affraid that the government is going to somehow find out about your secret buffy the vampire slayer (the movie) sticker collection? The ammount of data that would be collected would be massive and the little things you do in your day would only be paid attention to if they fell into some pattern that indicated you were a rapist or a child molester. Frankly, if you arent breaking the law, even in the most extreme cases of "Big Brother" you have nothing to worry about. Your "I've read/know of 1984" paranoia is an irrational fear. You might as well sit in the basement of thode and be afraid of the impending shark attack, because it is more likely. Do you realize the level of organization that would be required to "Big Brother" this up? It is both financially and technologically out of reach. The government struggles and fights to get done the few things it does, they dont have extra free time to watch you while you eat your breakfast.

I seriously hope you were just joking to get me going.

This is entirely separate to what this whole thread is about (but from other threads on mac insiders, it seems to be the norm) but ill continue anyways

In regards to the whole big brother thing: There is a difference from being seen and being stalked.

The whole big brother thing isn't irrational. Typically how this works is governments will implement small changes for which will build up over time and people dont really notice them or they implement large changes for various reasons (safety for example) and then when a threat is gone, they keep the measure in place.

one problem is with the whole surveillance/tracking/ big brother thing is that it takes away some of our personal freedom. example: if its the middle of the night and you want to cross main street and there are no cars at all, are you going to wait till the walk symbol appears? probably not but it is illegal. if you were tracked or caught on camera then you would be ticketed. And while you can argue that this would never happen, there have been slow and gradual steps moving toward this kind of thing. This wouldnt happen all of a sudden but over a really long period of time (long enough that we will never see it).

Imagine a society like in the movie minority report.

I see where you are coming from. MY TA had pointed out that given enough "insignificant" information, you could track somebody, and that students who participate should be made aware of that fact... But here was his point:
If you know someone is in B.Tech, you know their favourite movie (and it isn't star wars) , and you know their favourite food, and which club they're on, you could POTENTIALLY narrow it down to one person.

My question though: And then what? Yes, the school COULD take the system, give themselves access to the database, and could possibly narrow some persons student card down, based on their preferences. But what do they do with that? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY! The man power and time to do that for just one person! You can't write a computer program to do that.

So based on that, I have to agree with Rossclot: There does seem to be an irrational fear that they could potentially track you, and they could potentially start charging you for things, like the whole J-Walking example you gave. I see that you have some principle in preventing that from happening. But your principle is outweighing a HUGE common good: The system would eliminate hundreds of thousands of papers on campus EACH YEAR, and it would also give Mac a much greater technological appeal.

I would say yes, with the exception of the area of residence (because I don't know how applicable that is and it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable). I just don't see why campus would need to know where you live really unless it was your full address, but that doesn't seem to be what you mean.

That's a valid argument. I will justify that statement though: It could be valuable in putting up ads for bus services to Oakville vs. just up King Street.