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No ID Cards in the Future
dmf writes "Throw away your identification cards! CNet is running a commentary piece on what the author perceives to be contradictions of privacy as technology continues to evolve our future. What boggles the mind is how social forecasters can so easily bypass longstanding privacy concerns by simply ignoring the horrific examples of abusive governments throughout history. How can a responsible thinker so easily shrug off the need to protect oneself from the unknown abuses of the future just because one may think things are relatively agreeable at present?"
Did anyone else notice that the author of this nearly content-free article referred to Bruce Schneier's complaint about hotels requiring a driver's license, then completely ignored the REST OF THE SENTENCE where Bruce explained why that is a bad thing?
It's a good thing the article was short, or I'd be bummed about wasting the time to read it.
Actually it scares me *not* to need an ID card. With face recognition, fingerprinting, and other biometric measures in place. I don't recall being asked for permission about any of these.
"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men--the right to be let alone."
- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Consider the Patriot Act and new changes being pushed by the neoconservative administration, I can't help but think the Bill of Rights is turning in to what happened to the rights list in Animal Farm.
Proud to post (this one) Anonymously!
Several months ago I read a post here that got me thinking about my SSN. According to the post, the SSN was not intended to be an ID number, but has gradually evolved into one. (Anyone who can post a reference to confirm this would be appreciated. I Googled around for a while but could only find references that equated SSN with ID). So I started noticing how often people ask me for it. I've been quite surprised at how often it is asked for. Exam registration, scholarship application, research conference registration, volunteer application, etc. I've started writing "available upon request" when it asked for my SSN, and no one has complained. But it makes me wonder how many times I've given it out without thinking twice about it?
There was a really good discussion about privacy issues in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig. It gave a clear description of the problem and proposed some alternative solutions. One of his points was that privacy was formerly the default simply because no one was capable of maintaining a practical and useable database of the size that would be necessary. Because of this former impossibility, there was no need for legislation or other guidelines to address it. That makes the problem unique to our day and age because only recently have we had the technology to do these sorts of things. Lessig argues that in such cases we have two options:
- Interpret the Constitution as literally as possible. If the costitution says it's okay (or fails to say that it's not), then go for it.
- Determine a solution based upon the same principles that the founding fathers used.
Lessig tends to lean toward the second option, and he's very persuasive in arguing his viewpoint. One possible solution that he proposed was for database owners to blind themselves to personal information and to only use the data for statistical analyses. From the article: "IBM, for instance, is tinkering with "randomizing" data, which involves fatally altering data in a database. Number-crunchers can subsequently use the randomized data to study trends in the numbers, but can never reconstruct the original data--an improvement over using encrypted data." That sounds like a good solution to some of the problems. Companies can use their database to improve marketing research but can't use them to invade your privacy.Anyway, just some things to think about...