Pay Dirt in Scanned Driver's Licenses

The New York Times has a good article explaining why handing over your national ID card to be scanned may not be such a good idea.

Comments

hypocrisy

[anthony_dipierro]

The electronic trails created by scanning driver's licenses are raising concerns among privacy advocates. Standards and scanning, they say, are a dangerous combination that essentially creates a de facto national identity card or internal passport that can be registered in many databases.

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Does anyone else find that hilarious?

Re:Defacto Privacy

[electroniceric]

Well put.

The irony is that what causes the info-tracking technology to cross the line between helpful and invasive is the efforts of clever software engineers in making information impossible easy to store and follow.

The crux of your analogy is following people around. But what if you could record every conversation within a mile as easily as overhearing it? Even people with the most innoccuous intentions could run roughshod over privacy. That seems to me to be exactly what this bar owner is saying: "Well, I bought this doodad to reduce the hassles that go along with checking IDs properly (or checking them improperly and get browbeaten by local liquor control boards), but as long as it says click here to build Customer-Experience Enhancement Profiles, I figure I'll give this a shot." And then, "Wow, this is really useful to me. I can make my bar do much better business."

Information seems more and more to want to be free. The problem is setting it free without letting run around without its pants on.

Re:Junk Mail

[spike hay]

Jeez. Sounds bad. Giving your personal information away every time your credit card is scanned.

About as bad as giving your personal information away for a nytimes.com account.