Top Brit judge thinks we’ll warm to our Panopticon overlords
Sir Geoffrey Vos QC, Chancellor of the High Court and former head of the Bar Council, raised the prospect of compulsory mobe-carrying in a speech to the Law Society (PDF).
Vos drew attention to the advantages that a permanent record of an individual’s movement could have on cutting crime.
He did not personally advocate the compulsory carrying of location-aware technology, but speculated that public resistance to it may diminish in the future.
Digital mobile phones have always offered law enforcement the ability to obtain the location of devices via cell tower triangulation, but Silicon Valley’s obsessive data hoarding has made the job easier. Google never throws anything away, and continues to collect (and store) location data even when GPS location services are disabled.
Two years ago a US appeal court ruled that law enforcement requests to obtain the location history acquired and stored by Google Maps did not require a warrant, as the user had shared the data voluntarily. The Supreme Court of the United States is mulling the issue (Carpenter vs USA) and a decision is expected by June.
We asked the Chancellor’s office for clarification. ®
