Three Arches

Tuesday May 24, 2005 - 10:50AM EDT

But what's the potential downside? Privacy watchers say that as biometric scanners become more widespread, it becomes possible for organizations--companies, the government--to create a detailed dossier of your physical movements as you pass from one scanner to the next. - full article

I fucking hate those vehement privacy watchers sometimes. In reference to the blurb above, don't they realize that doing that stuff is already possible. Maybe they do and the article's author is a pea-brained moron. I don't know, I am just hungry right now and want to not be at work. I don't have a problem with storing massive amounts of personal and would encourage data gathering and storage on everyone. I don't like having to carry keys, cash and credit cards everywhere. I guess I understand the whole privacy issue to an extent, but I swear that book 1984 has made generations of people overly paranoid concerning privacy. Besides it is a immense fallicy to think that we will lose any privacy with new technology. This is not a paranoid statement. But the CIA can pretty much get any information they want on you whenever they want. Not for sinister reasons, that is just what they do, gather information about everything. I don't get the fervor over national id cards that some countries have proposed. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is. So they will have a database of everyone in the country. They already do now, it just isn't as organized. Couple national id cards with voting reform that would be smart. I also don't like the idealogy of championing state autonomy in areas that should obviously be handled on a national level. Like voting for instance. Wait I already went over this, it is an ego thing and form of control. Which is ironic since decentralizing is a form of control and national standards would acutally allow more freedom.

And another thing. There is no need anymore to store personal information on the identification device. Credit cards don't need to store any data in that little magneetic strip except and id number that connects to a database that has your information. Makes sense, you have to be connected to make a payment anyway. I never understood why they put personal data on the cards magnetic strip anyway. That will change anyway with the introduction of RFID credit cards in the coming years. All the major card companies are swithing to it and I think the smaller easier to use cards(no signature required, which by the way is a piss poor verification system) they don't store any personal data just a number to connect to their network and get your info. Ideally you info should include a picture so that if people tried to use your card the clerk would simple compare who is using it to a picture provided by the credit card company over the network. That would make identity theft immmensely dificult. Which brings me to another point, why didn't Citibank's picture on card idea spread to all other credit card companies, seems like a really good way to prevent theft. National citizens database would make it much easier to prevent indentity theft because you could make it so that for one to get credit their information must be validated against the national database. And email notification would be sent to the person when credit was applied for. It would virtually eliminate ID theft among the petty small time crooks and leave it to the domain of really good computer systems crackers. Sure there will be growing pains and problems with setting up a system. But it would be superior to the crap stash we have today.