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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.