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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.
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are my own. Any bar that is scanning my ID and keeping a record or pulling other data is not getting my business. Then again, when I buy beer at the grocery store and put it on my debit card, it is doing the same thing.
We (the collective us) have been rushing at a breakneck speed down the tunnel of complete mediation. Everything about us will be known. Except perhaps to ourselves.
Wow, that was pretty deep for this early in the morning...
Some of the information collected such as eye color, height and such doesn't bother me to compile, since that information is publicly available.
However, I hold a chauffeur's license. It requires that I furnish my Social Security number, which should not be publicly available.
I feel I should not have to change my license (or profession, if I still was doing such) just to protect my privacy.
I remember a few years back there was this huge scandal in Canada where people had devised a Palm Pilot add on which could act as a magnetic strip reader.
You could swipe any card and it would extract the information from the magnetic strip and store it in a database.
Rescently we've been working with Card readers here at my company and let me tell you, there is some interesting information on those cards.
Basically, there's two 'tracks' of data. ASCII data of course. I think the limit is 64 Characters per track. It was fun to to go swiping cards to see what information was stored on them. Student IDs, Drivers Liscences, Credit Cards, Health Cards, Hotel Room Keys and even some other strips worked (FastPass anyone ?).
The down side is these readers can cost upwards of $300 to $500 and the Driver Software leaves -little- to be desired (VB anyone ?), but then again, it's OEM hardware so we were lucky to even get software support.
You could also move someplace that doesn't use them. Nevada still uses old-school Polaroid-generated licenses, for instance. (I think that might change in the next few years...on the upside, though, they quit issuing licenses with numbers derived from your SSN a few years ago.)
It'd be interesting to see what would happen if you "accidentally" left a license with a magnetic strip sitting on top of a really powerful magnet...assuming that all the stuff anybody needs is also printed on the license, maybe that's a fix for your problem.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
This article points out several issues with using driver's licenses for ID:
1. They include information that's specific for driving that may be used other identifying features.
2. Each state has it's own standard. For example, some store social security numbers, other fingerprints, most store address, etc.
The core failing of this issue is that driver licenses (and social secuirity numbers) were never designed nor intended to provide general identification.
What is required is a standard that appies to the entire country for what can be used on ID's. One solution is to establish a National ID, administered by the federal government, which would replace the state drivers licenses and social security numbers strictly for providing identification in a secure manner. Another solution would be for the federal goverment to establish guidelines to be followed by the states in establishing IDs.
The current situation is unacceptable from both a privacy and an identification point of view.
She is of Chinese background. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture, and her parents wanted to give her a lucky middle name. If I recall correctly, this would not be so exotic in Chinese, where ideograms and sounds have multiple meanings (in fact, I think lucky numbers often get their "lucky" quality from the fact that the characters and/or sounds for such numbers resemble other words which have positive meanings).
It has apparently caused her some grief when dealing with computerized systems which flag "8." as a typo in the middle initial field, but she has stuck with it.
For another weird numerical name, do a Google search for guy that works for Microsoft whose first name is "M3." It's really bizarre...I don't know the story behind that one.
...is a magnet.
Ah, it happened to me once, but the other way around. I was at a grocery store in California buying beer. The cashier asks for my ID and I show her my U.S. Georgia driver license. She then tells me that she is sorry but she is not allowed to sell alcohol to out-of-State resident.
WTF?
I eventually walked out of there with the beer because I happened to also have my Belgian passport with me. That was ok.
Go figure. It has probably to do with rural superstition or something. Don't deprive Belgians of their beers!
Could get dangerous. The world might stop spinning . An asteroid might hit the Earth.
Now think of the same situation, but someone is following you around with a microphone recording everything you say.
Or let's stick with out doorman checking your ID. Suppose when he did, he took out a book and started writing down everything on it. How many people would demand their ID back and complain to managment that it was none of the doorman's damn business?
Nope, no sig
Still, this article's theme provokes some thoughts:
What will change in 2004 when it has to be renewed?
If I could read either stripe, would I find that the privacy statement was inaccurate?
After all, we've had a Republican governor here for way too many years.....
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Cig:
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To pick a silly example, it's important that it be public knowledge that somebody lives in my home, because if the building catches on fire I want people to let me know and help me get out.
No, it's not important. It's a home. Basically all homes have people living in them, so the odds are that someone lives in the place that's on fire. Are they inside, or are they out at work? That's why we have the fire dept. - they can go in and check.
Even if no-one lives in a house, there could still be people inside - maybe the house is empty, but the landlord is visiting. Maybe someone got beaten up and dumped inside. Your example doesn't work.
Some things should be public information by default
Why? Give a good reason, not a "convenience" reason.
There are things that it is useful to make available - eg. it's a good thing that merchants can verify my address from my credit card number, so they can refuse to deliver to somewhere that's not my house, or make sure that they send an invoice to my house or whatever.
It's probably not such a good thing that they can acyually get my address - better would be for them to supply an address, and Visa to say "yes" or "no", but that'll need fuzzy textual matching, so that's not so easy.
But that's not _public_ information - I can't call up Visa with a credit card number and get an address, I have to be an authorised merchant to do so.
Yeah, and anyone who tries to purchase an airline ticket with cash is branded a terrorist.
In countries that don't have national ID cards (e.g. the UK) most people would consider being forced to show ID to be a huge invasion of civil rights and privacy.
It took me a while to stop being pissed off every time someone asked me for ID after moving to the US, but eventually I got used to it. I suspect that most people will get used to the fact that they no longer have any privacy in the modern age also.
>You see the pattern? What's an ID card going to do? All your purchasing data and aggregate
>information already belong to some shady corporation.
Yea, but currently not any one credit card company knows all of my "trends". I have multiple cards and do different things with different cards. While different banks know different things, not one bank knows all of those things. With a single all-purpose national ID card, one entity (be it corporate or governmental) can then track ALL of my spending and travel habits. I'd much prefer to have this distributed so it's not so easy to abuse the complete collection of data collected about me - if someone steals one credit card, that would be easier to cope with than losing my complete identity at once.
I can't stop myself from rolling my eyes every time I read stuff like this.
There are 6 billion people in the planet, why would the "system" want to spy on you?
Maybe because you have terrorist plans or a HD full of kiddie porn. In that case, you SHOULD be spied on and put in jail.
I you are not a criminal, chill.
Companies, on the other hand, use personal info to try to target their advertising. Why is this so bad? I rather get advertising related to my interests than random crap. If they target it wrong, they won't sell and the problem will fix itself.
I *want* tiny devices that keep track of all my personal information, daily activities, location, friends, family, pets and bathroom supplies. - As long as it's useful for *me*.
Let's stop being paranoid and start innovating.
I stopped contributing to WETA, a Washington, DC public radio and TV station, some years ago when they admitted to selling my name and address to mailing lists. I knew they had done it before they told me because they had uniquely messed up my name on their labels and that same name kept cropping up time after time. They called me during their last fund-raiser and asked for a contribution. I told them that I would be happy to contribute but only after I went a year without getting any junk mail with that name on it!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
This only reads the front, but rigging a similar shelf arrangement to scan the backside would not be difficult.
I checked out the 2-D barcode on the back of the Illinois license, and on mine, which does not have the SSN on the front, there is no SSN in the barcode.There does not appear to be any magstripe on the new Illinois licenses.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
IIRC the method for deriving you SSN from your nevada DL was (dl#+26)/2
might have another step... cant quite remember...
I'm a non-driver who was on a trip to Chicago -- tried to get into the Excalibur. The bouncer actually had a nice thick book, about 100 pages, with details on what all of these different licenses and ID's look like. He thumbed to Louisiana, looked over my ID, and waved me in. As for my friend who didn't have a collared shirt... Anyway, how hard is it for these knuckleheads to get something like this?
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
a newspaper article of a few years back here in the Bay Area - John Draper (Capn Crunch) and someother people had got into trouble with the local cops .... seems someone had figured out that you could record a BART ticket (local mass transit) which is basicly a mag stripe by running it through a common tape recorder - what they'd do was take a tickets with $20 on it and record it, then play it back over tickets with 10c on them
I don't generally have a problem with companies that store data about the transactions that I have with them. It's when they start correlating that data with other sources that I start to get concerned.
In this example data gathered by the Registry of Motor Vehicles (or whatever your state calls them) is being correlated with services and purchases at a Bar.
The article mentioned the scenario of how a fictitious bouncer could use that data to stalk women.
There are many scenrios of abuse that this could be used for. Basically the technology allows for your movments and habits to be monitored very easily. That information could be used by others to your harm and detriment. It could be used by governements, businesses, or individuals.
In todays society it is alomst unthinkable to live without a drivers license. That makes it very difficult to opt out. Sure you can stop going out to clubs and restaurants. Perhaps you can use only public transportation. You could even pay cash for everything so theres no need to provide your license when presenting a credit card. It seems that giving up your privacy is becoming the price you must pay to participate in the beinfits of todays society.
The use of these devices is bound to increase as business look to reduce risks and increase profits. It's a very slippery slope. Think about where it's all likely to lead.
I used to think that George Orwell wrote Science Fiction.
It will never be illegal to purchase things with cash or barter.
It already sort of is.
The statement that "the information is already on the front of the card therefore there are no privacy issues" totally misses the point. Think about the alternative. Instead of scanning the license, the bar has to write all of the info down or type it into a computer, just so you can go into the bar. No customer is going to sit there in the cold and wait for some bouncer that types 5 word per minute to fumble the info into a terminal. There are data entry errors to consider and in the first example below the data, though perhaps not all of it, has to be entered in repeatedly during a visit. Remember that technology serves to make menial, tedious tasks easier and orders of magnitude faster. In the time it takes for Bubba to transcribe the face of your drivers license, this scanner has taken 10 more IDs and updated a hundred databases around the world. The second that information becomes digital, it can be traded, sold, exploited a million times in a second totally unregulated. People who try to apply traditional reasoning to societal issues and technology truly don't understand. Sadly these people are the same ones who make your laws.
When you have a problem and you arrive at a possible solution you have to ask does this solution really solve my problem? Is this scanning solution to the underage drinking/smoking problem really even solving the problem? Ask the RIAA or the MPAA about their efforts to thwart piracy. Long story short, if you can come up with a way to prevent theft, or in this case fraud, someone can come up with a way to defeat it and come up with it faster than it took for you to devise it.
Lets take this scanning system a small step further. Now in this bar, you must show your ID to make your alcohol purchase. Your consumption is tracked and based upon the number of drinks, the strength of those drinks and your weight from your drivers license, it roughly calculates your blood alcohol level. Persons having too good a time tracked and the cops are waiting outside for you to get into your car. So, you might say that this would have a dramatic effect on the drinking and driving fatalities in this country. I reluctantly agree that in this small context that the end justifies the means. Less dead people is good right? Perhaps another example where it does not is necessary.
Now lets say that you are a responsible adult and when you do have too good a time at the pub you foot it home or call a cab. No cops, no night in the tombs (yeah, my Law & Order affection gives me away again) so things are good. Wrong. Remember this information is digital, anyone can buy it. What about your employer? You show up at the office after a weekend of partying only to find your stuff packed and your pink slip on your desk because you booze a little to much in you _off_ time. Or perhaps your auto insurance company buys the same info and considers you a higher risk, higher auto premiums. Same goes for cigarette purchases. Health insurance companies buy up the info and increase your premiums or cancel your policy when they see your addiction is getting out of hand.
Ok, but why does a National ID card do anyone any good? Just as individuals can forge passports they will be just as able to forge ID cards. In fact, making things electronic just give the potential for individuals to hijack other individuals identities more rapidly.
It's not just a matter of privacy, but of usefulness. It's sort of like the gun-control argument whereas people argue that making it harder to obtain a gun permit will keep guns away from criminals. Well, hate to burst everyone's bubble, but criminals never got friggin permits to begin with!
Likewise, a terrorist isn't going to be stopped by a 'National ID' card. If I really thought it would protect the country from terrorists, I would let Doubleclick.com stick a tracking probe up my ass. The fact of the matter is, this is just rheotric that is only gonna to cause more harm and headache for the average Joe.
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I've worked in government, and I'm not going out on a limb when I say that the government is too damn incompetent to get anything useful out of tracking our M&M consumption habits, as it were.
Well, the private sector is a bigger worry, but Kenneth Starr used Monica Lewinsky's shopping habits on her credit card to see where she was at any point on a given day via a court order, which is a level of insidiousness that isn't given to the private secotr, sans maybe the merger giants like AOL/Time Warner.