This week in Greece Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor shared the latest Eurobarometer (a series of surveys regularly performed on behalf of the European Commission) findings that show that 2/3 of European Union citizens are very concerned about the security and privacy of their information. The figures are even higher in Austria and Germany, with over 90% respondents sharing their concerns on these important topics. Countries like the United Kingdom do this kind of research on a yearly basis and the results show the same trend in awareness of data security and privacy issues.
And why wouldn’t we?
This Monday, a new law in the Netherlands is enforced in compliance to the EU rules that all passports should have biometric data. The only difference is that the Netherlands opted to also keeps a central database of these fingerprints for all its citizens.
Personally, that does not make me feel any more confident, and just a little bit more 1984.
Well, we [citizens of Poland
] are still waiting for the biometrical passports.
Too bad that people in Poland are not that security-conscious when it comes to IT
I would like to see that data correlated to the number of people who actually have passports with biometric data. Additionally it would be nice to see some data on adoption of that biometric security in everyday scenarios.
I live in a EU country that has not yet fully implemented biometric data passports. Even then I struggle to see where exactly that data may be misused, as opposed to where current data in my passport can be misused today.
People cry wolf if their birthdate is stored somewhere and the next moment they voluntarily spread out all their personal history for everybody to see in privately run websites such as LinkedIn and Xing.
What you have is people living off of buzzwords like ‘data protection’ and kicking up a big fuss at every chance without explaining what exactly is the threat an honest man should be afraid of.