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Decode Your Barcode, Get Your Personal Info
Chris writes "The Swipe Toolkit is a collection of web-based tools that sheds light on personal data collection and usage practices in the United States. The tools demonstrate the value of personal information on the open market and enable people to access information encoded on a driver's license or stored in some of the many commercial data warehouses. Check out the Data Calculator, which shows how much your personal info is worth, and how the data brokers get it. It's all part of the Swipe Project, which will be on exhibition at UC-Irvine in March."
You can easily see that with a service such as MSN Hotmail, who already sells your personal info, your standard "I had best enter the correct info, or else bad things could happen" person can easily give them (as this project puts it) about $10 worth of personal info right in the sign-up boxes. MSN could then do a search through some of these free services and get even more money, as the information gains value if it is all stored in one location. We can then see how offering free email to the unwashed masses can be very profitable.
Its idealists like you that are source of the problem. Get it in your head once and for good: "People are not equal! People will never be equal!"
Once you get this little bit, you might stop dreaming about people being all equally screwed since that will never happen.
And when you stop dreaming, you might start to adjust to a world where people are not equal and start to vote for politicians that are aware of the issue and start asking for laws that will protect the weak from the strong and for society that works for both. And stop get abused by people that try to ram this strange concept down your throat to make you feel good about yourself.
And when you put all this in context with the US Supreme Court decision that Corporations are for all the legal matters "people", you get closer to my point.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
- Bankruptcy: $26.50
Court records bring in some big dough:- Felonies: $16.00
But the biggest payoff comes for Military Records: $35.00.When I got out of the military in the early 90s we were strongly encouraged to take our DD-214 (summary of military records) and submit them to the county clerk when we got back home so they'd become public record, that way if we ever lost it we could go look it up. I'm REAL GLAD(tm) I worked with Privacy Act information for my whole career and developed a healthy reluctance to hand out the juicy tidbits contained on my DD-214, e.g., SS#, DOB, education, and of course your whole military career.
Really the best tool is a Bulk Eraser designed for standard audio cassette tapes. They are very cheap on ebay and only about 20 bucks new from a [real] A/V supply shop.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
If you're handing your license to an officer you're way beond anonymity. Your best hope at that point is to keep a low profile.
And you'll get it. After a while some of the cops are going to know you by name AND face - "Yah that one with the broken card again". Plus the cops always have to pull your records from the online database for checks - so you might show up in a DB statistic/log somewhere. They can't just go - "Cards ok, looks like just another Joe, move along now".
If you want some semblance of anonymity, you hide in the herd. Or you go move somewhere else totally.
You don't hang around the herd looking and behaving different from everyone else, unless you want to be singled out on a regular basis. If the herd is chewing cud, you don't go around stomping unless you want to attract attention.
The NSA etc don't give a damn about the 80-90%. It's the unusual ones they watch.
The marketeers are interested in the 80%, but if you behave just like everyone else and hide the bits where you are different, you vanish into one of the Common categories.