The Georgia Lottery Would Like To See Your Location
Several years ago, I stumbled across an interesting find that the Georgia State Lottery allows “slot machine” style gaming in their iOS and Android apps. Yes, you can even fund your account right from your bank account and play like any other game you might have on your phone.
The catch: you should be inside the Peach State. Therefore, you must also give The Georgia Lottery access to your GPS location info for them to confirm this before the gaming begins.
This article isn’t so much about whether this is right or wrong. I tend to personally be more for gambling as it paid for almost all of my public undergraduate education here in Georgia for me to be able to analyze stuff like this and write about it.
Over the weekend, I tuned to local Atlanta Metro talk radio and this news story caught my ear about a large rent-to-own company purposely installing spyware on laptops they were renting to customers. Whoa, now. Let’s break this down.
A quick shop at this company’s website shows for $64.99 and up per month over the term of one year you can lease to own a new laptop. Actually service and repairs are included in this as well. But what is assumed by the news story above is that if one stops making timely payments, software was automatically installed on the laptop to enhance collection procedures to recover the original lease amount and probably extra fees.
The Federal Trade Commission deemed this unacceptable and the company agreed to cease installing the spyware across all 2,000+ corporate and franchised locations.
There are also interesting pros and cons to doorbell camera companies like Ring getting approval from counties to partner with police to have access to security and crime videos.
Another point here: where does this impact your primary job? What kind of data does your employer collect about you? How long is that data retained? How can it be used and who exactly can access it at your company?
In the European Union, The General Data Protection Regulation is now the law of the land. Fines up to €10 million or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year have quite the cause for concern for appointing Data Protection Officers and preventing data breaches.
Equifax ironically incorporated in Georgia, is still trying to get itself separated from its very damaging data breaches.
