Impact on Emerging

Technologies

Privacy in Computing

Contents

• Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) – Object for tracking people

• Electronic Voting – Technologies to facilitate elections

• Voice over Internet Protocols – Voice Grade telephone calls

Our main concern with the privacy in computing, has affect the emerging technologies

will consider 3 technologies.

These are:

Radio Frequency

Identification

Privacy in Computing

What it is and what it does

• Radio frequency identification or RFID is a technology that uses small, low-power wireless radio transmitters called RFID tags.

• Tags are tuned to a particular frequency and each has a unique ID number.

• When a tag receives its signal, it sends its ID number signal in response.

• Most of these devices are passive until they receive a signal from an interrogating reader.

• The distance at which they can receive and broadcast a receivable signal varies from roughly five centimeters at the least powerful end to several meters at the most powerful end.

Uses

• toll plaza payments

• transit system fare cards

• stock or inventory labels

• passports and identity cards

Current uses of RFID tags include

Applications of RFID

• Consumer products

• shirt, shoes, pen, wallet, credit card, mobile phone, media player, and candy bar wrapper

• RFID Tags for Individuals

Security and Privacy

• the ability to track individuals wherever they go

• the ability to discern sensitive data about people.

• The correctness of the data obtained.

• The reading sensor may malfunction or the software processing IDs may

fail.

• Forgery of an RFID tag.

Electronic Voting

Privacy in Computing

Computer Voting

• Each voter's choices must be kept secret.

• Each voter may vote only once and only for allowed offices.

• The voting system must be tamperproof, and the election officials must be prevented from allowing it to be tampered with.

• All votes must be reported accurately.

• The voting system must be available for use throughout the election period.

• An audit trail must be kept to detect irregularities in voting, but without disclosing how any individual voted.

Properties essential to a fair election were enumerated as:

Privacy and the Process

• Counting ballots,

• building and maintaining the list of eligible voters,

• recording who has voted,

• supporting absentee ballots,

• assisting voters at the wrong polling place, and

• transmitting election results to election headquarters.

The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Science:

• individual privacy in voter registration, the privacy of individual voters, and public confidence in the process.

VoIP and Skype

Privacy in Computing

What it is and how it works

• Voice over IP (VoIP) is a protocol for transmission of voice-grade

telephone traffic over the Internet.

• The major VoIP carrier is Skype.

• To call from Chennai to Accra, for example, you would invoke the VoIP

application, giving it the telephone number in Accra. A local office in Accra

would call the number in Accra and patch that call to its Internet servers.

(The process is even easier if both endpoints use VoIP.)

Merit and Privacy

• cost

• the phone call will be somewhat exposed through packet headers.

Thank You