Law

Bath University finds itself defending claims by an advokat and law firms who claim the school breached the privacy of individuals and disregarded the rights of consumers and the general public. This story started innocently enough, with Bath University allowing a research project, called Cityware. In the first stages of this project, the researchers had scanners installed at specific places around the city, and these scanners were intended to pick up and monitor Bluetooth devices which emit radio signals. Bluetooth allows communication between devices for a short distance. Ten thousand people unknowingly had their data collected and stored in a central research database with the use of these scanners. The advokat claims that the privacy of the citizens of the city was breached, and that the university acted covertly and with a blatant disregard for the rights of consumers and citizens. The director of the group Privacy International, Simon Davies, says that individuals can be identified by their Bluetooth signals.

An advokat for consumers, and one who usually handles liability lawsuits, says that the university secretly and covertly monitored the movements of citizens without their consent or knowledge, using the signals that are emitted by their laptop computers and cell phones. The head of the project, Eamonn O’Neill, who is also the director of the postgraduate research studies in the computer science department at Bath University, did not take the criticism from law firms, the advokat, and citizens quietly. He defended the Cityware project, stating the importance of the research as an excuse for the methods, and also predicting that in time this research may help determine ways to monitor prisoners and criminals. Advokater and lawyers point out however that the ends in this case do not justify secretly monitoring citizens without their informed consent. In a statement Dr. O’Neill stated that the research data was securely stored, and that to determine the actual identity of the device owner would require a substantial amount of cross referencing. As one advokat pondered, though, who knows what is possible once the data has been compiled. The fact that citizens were secretly monitored without consent goes against the basic principal of scientific research, which required informed consent from any research participant, and in this case that was not done, opening up Bath University and the project participants to a host of liability and breach of privacy lawsuits by an advokat representing citizens who were monitored.

Tags: News and Media, Politics, Society

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.