According to the dutch news site nu.nl, the Swiss police uses laptops to see if your navigation system is loaded with maps that show speed cameras. You can get fined and have your Tom Tom confiscated for this, even if it’s in the trunk of your car. So what’s next? Steganography for your GPS? A kill-button on your phone?
Coupled with the notion of being forced to log into your laptop for it to be inspected at the border, this really can only lead to two possible outcomes. Either we get to keep a few of our secrets, or we don’t. If we do, we can safely laugh at the Swiss, US Customs and others. If we don’t, then this is still not an efficient way of doing things. After we get the world’s legal systems ‘harmonized’, it’s probably easier to make knowledge of the inner workings of technology a strictly regulated item. The prosecution of unregulated possession, use or (worse) dissemination of such knowledge is much less likely to annoy the masses.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
I agree this Swiss law (while it might be good in its goal) is not practical. To my understanding, you are allowed to know where speed cameras are and allowed to have navigation systems (noticed how many news sources call them ‘TomToms’?) but combining those is illegal. Looking into the functioning of ones computers is somewhat of a challenge, besides being incredibly invasive, thus again not meeting the criterium of proportionality.
Another country to avoid? But most users will probably not even know about the rules and simply use their TomTom (or any other navsys) with whatever maps / services it came with.
By the way: Does this site’s captcha require javascript or cookies to be enabled? I get an error every time I try to post with them disabled. I would expect otherwise from a security/privacy minded blog.
(Firefox with CookieSafe and NoScript)