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

My drinking habits...

[crumbz]

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...

Defacto Privacy

[rev_icon]

One of the points the proponents of these scanning machines said in the article that these machines don't violate privacy because they're just reading out the same information that is on the front of the drivers license. Of course, technically this is true, and it is just the same as if someone was photocopying every license that is shown at the door, but it's also alot different.

Think about this... if you were walking in the park with someone, and you were talking about your girlfriend and some new car that she just bought, and someone walks by and happens to overhear you talking about this, it's not an invasion of privacy. You're in the park, it's a public place. Now think of the same situation, but someone is following you around with a microphone recording everything you say. Technically it's still not an invasion of privacy because you're in a public place, and because you're saying it in public, it's public information, but it's still a Completely Different thing.

-Matt
Free Your Mind

From the nation who...

[Anonymous Coward]

• pays their phone bills with credit cards
• buys food with credit cards
• buys gas with credit card
• buys bus/train/airplane tickets with credit cards

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.

If you don't trust your government, then fine. Why do you trust the corporations then?

Re:it seems..

[Lumpy]

dont have to....

Go home, take a nice fridge magnet... that pizza place magnet will do..
set the magnet on the strip, rub a few times... Voila

Then they have to type it in.

Here's why it's so nefarious...

[Squirrel Killer]

From the story:

"It's the same information as the front of the license," said Frank Mandelbaum, chairman and chief executive of Intelli- Check, a manufacturer of license-scanning equipment based in Woodbury, N.Y. "If I were to go into a bar and they had a photocopier, they could photocopy the license or they could write it down. They are not giving us any information that violates privacy."

If I went to a bar that tried to photocopy my driver's license, I'd damn sure turn around and go elsewhere. By making the privacy invasion so subtle, they've muted reasonable objections.

-sk

Re:Here's why it's so nefarious...

[Jordy]

The debate against National ID cards still confuses me. It seems to me that if they built a national ID card where everything was contained electronically and there was little to no information on the front, you could do *more* to protect privacy than the current standard of relying on driver's licenses.

The real trick would be developing a method whereby only the information you want to give out is accessible.

My first thought would be to encrypt each peice of information with a different key, but then the government would need to distribute private keys to each business which takes the control out of your hands. On the other hand, if done correctly, they could give access to a liquor store to only be able to decrypt a photograph and if a person is over 21 or not (not even age.)

A better solution of course would be a method of allowing each person to control what information a particular vendor retrieves, but practically speaking, is much more difficult than the above solution.

If the above described card was issued as a national ID card, we'd all be a lot better off. Of course then every club would need a little scanner to read the information instead of being able to just look at the front... but that's not my problem now is it? :)

It's already worse than you think.

[Matey-O]

While I'm not defending the practice, I'm reminded what I felt when two of the three big chain grocery stores went to a frequent user card.

I went defiantly to the third. NOBODY needs to know when I buy my Milk and Eggs!

When somebody pointed out that Costco, the Chain I love and frequent, and am frankly a cult member of, does the SAME THING, and has done so for YEARS before the Grocery Stores did it really brought me up short.

This is unfortunately a sign of the times. And without turning unibomber and living in a shack in Wyoming, there's not really much you can do about it. It's similar to the emissions and seat belt laws in the 70's. TONS of people didn't like it, but now it's commonplace.

I doubt it's going to turn into the 1984 that the alarmists paint it as, but It's also going to make more than a few people more than a little upset when it's abused. (IT WILL BE ABUSED. And when it does, the public outcry will make it financially unadvisable to abuse it further.)

Re:It's already worse than you think.

[CoreyG]

The only real reason grocery stores have food cards is to make more money. They use various combinations of data mining tools and predictive analytics to figure out what people like to buy, who the best(read most profitable) customers are, and who are the cherry pickers(read most costly). Then they market to their best customers and not the cherry pickers. Or they devise promotions to sell a well-selling item with a poor-selling item. Or a well-selling item with a high-profit item. The list goes on and on. The only reason they do it though, is to make money. The only way the analyses are at all accurate is because of the aggregate amount of data they collect. Performing an analysis on 1 person's data would be useless. Most retail-specific applications don't even provide tools to look at specific customers, only categories of customers that satisfy specific criteria. Retailers don't make money by looking at your purchasing habits. They do it by looking at everyone's purchasing habits together. You alone are not valuable to them.
Now, could all this be abused by selling your information to others? Possibly. Except retailers are most likely making money directly off your information themselves, and prefer to keep it that way. Grocers are usually quite territorial with their shoppers and generally would not risk anyone else getting hold of their customers; they make too much money compared to the amount they'd make by simply selling a list.

Re:No License?

[Delirium Tremens]

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.

so... DEmagentize the freakin card!

[CrudPuppy]

I have been doing this to my licenses ever since
the advent of the stupid magnetic strip.

This way, people who need the info (e.g. police)
can still get it, but dickheads that like to track
the clientele in their bars dont.

It's not like they're not going to let someone old
enough pay the establishment 300% profit on alcohol
just because their license got demagnetized.