Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

"An individual would not, while using a mall directory, reasonably expect their image to be captured and used to create a biometric representation of their face, which is sensitive personal information, or for that biometric information to be used to guess their approximate age and gender," they wrote.

Genuine question - if mall had deployed people whose job was to look at people to guess their gender, age and then jot it down in a notebook, then would it have been a problem?

If not, then why this is a problem? Assuming that the 'biometric representation' is discarded by the system after guessing the age and gender.

It seems however that in the case of the Canadian mall implementation (or more precisely their solution provider) they stored more than this number, losing the anonymous property of a system they sold as an "Anonymous Video Analytics".

In my opinion, something should be called anonymous if and only if you cannot go back from the stored data to a personally identifiable information.

It is not "the government is corrupt, therefore all is pointless". Instead, there are scenarios such as:

- the government is comprised of people, running different departments - those people seem to think they are doing things for the common good - courts determine otherwise, and point to laws passed by legislative bodies as validation - activity stops

"Spy agencies", and "policing agencies" are constantly under these checks and balances. Cases are thrown out, individual careers are axed, when warrants are not used when they should, for example, when searching homes.

Without the laws, and court cases as they are, then the police would simply enter without those warrants, get convictions, and carry on very happy with themselves.

The real problem here is that technology grows so very fast, and that the world is changing quite rapidly. Don't even get me started on bio-tech, or near-Earth space changes over the next decade. Or Interplanetary law!

Legislative bodies, and law, are literally meant to deal with things over the course of decades or more. Legislative bodies tend to sit for 4 years or more! Change is slower, and of course, we like slower change for many things.

But this means that laws much 'catch up' to faster moving change.

Hell just crafting a law, going through the committees, hearing from experts, at least in Canada, then crafting the law, reading it in both houses, and more experts can take more than a year or two.

And that's after the will is in place to enact change.

This is part of the reason I deem the executive branch as having value, but, that is another discussion.

All said, I fear governments with this power most, and private corps next. One law takes care of both of these scenarios.

Lastly?

Never ignore the interest in something. Any old horse trader will tell you, if everyone clamours for something, it has immense value!

Knowing if I farted last week on Tuesday, is of immense information to everyone. Wha? Yet it is! And if it is of such value, if everyone climbs over each other to get that data, to hold it exclusively, to sell it, trade it, there is likely some import to such things.

If this info is so insanely valuable, then shouldn't the creator control it? Control what happens to it?

We have copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and even things like labour laws, acts to protect safety!

The entire purpose of law, is to protect "my stuff" from "that other guy". My life. My belongings. My health.

Yet this? This is all just "OK"?

The current laws surrounding data, are like period of times before labour laws, before human rights legislation, before food safety acts, and on and on.

This period of time is ending. Legislative bodies are catching up.

The question is, what will happen during the transformative period, where law catches up, and passes more and more laws about personal privacy, and control over personal data?