Renewed Festival Wrist-Band Poison Alert
Leading German music magazine Electronic Beats warned this week that festival-goers who don’t discard festival wristbands risk developing ‘acute food poisoning’ and ‘boils and infections of cuts and grazes’ because of dangerous levels of bacteria measured by scientists at the University of Surrey.
Their warning came just over a year after University of Surrey microbiologist Dr Alison Cottell singled out septicaemia and specific staphylococcus bacteria including hospital superbug, MRSA in an interview with the Daily Mail.
“A rough ballpark figure would be that the amount of bacteria that grew on wristbands was about 20 times higher than you would expect to find on the sleeve of a piece of clothing that would be regularly laundered,” she said. (Daily Mail)
The fresh warning emerged months after technology site Mashable warned that festivalgoers in the UK face increasing risk of mass surveillance upon entering events, some 12 months after Leicester cops admitted used facial recognition system Neoface to scan the faces of all 90,000 revellers at the Download Festival.
Though Leicester Police said they had ‘no immediate plans’ to repeat the operation, Mashable noted that many UK festivals now require ticket buyers to provide photo ID in advance with huge amounts of additional personal data now routinely requested from high profile UK events,
“Is the imagery being compared to law enforcement databases, medical databases, or social media profiles?” Privacy International expert Christopher Weatherhead told Mashable, pointing out that it’s ‘nearly impossible to find out who the dataset is shared with or cross-referenced against’.
“Festival-goers should not be treated like suspects just because they wish to enjoy an event,” he suggested. (Mashable )
Neoface: “NeoFace Watch integrates with existing video surveillance systems enhancing security by extracting faces in real time from surveillance or even web cameras and instantaneously matching them against a watchlist of individuals . . .”
George Orwell game: “A NEW SOLUTION FOR STATE SECURITY: Thanks to the government’s Safety Bill, the Nation is experiencing the lowest levels of violent crime in years. But, our ambitious goals have not yet been reached; there still exists those who would pose a threat to our peaceful citizens. To all of us . . .”
