ID Tech May Mean an End to Anonymous Drinking

Anonymous Howard writes "If you visit a lot of bars and restaurants, you've likely crossed paths with driver's license scanners — machines that supposedly verify that your license is valid. In actuality, many of these scanners are designed to record your license information in addition to verifying them, and those that authenticate against a remote database are creating a record of when and where you buy alcohol. Not only that, but they're not even particularly effective — the bar code on your license uses an open, documented standard and can be rewritten to change your age or picture. Collecting our driver's license information is one thing, but collecting data about our personal drinking habits is not only a violation of, according to the ACLU representative quoted in the article, privacy and civil liberties, but this 'drinking record' could also create problems for people in civil and criminal lawsuits as proof of alcohol purchases in DUI cases or evidence of alcoholism in divorce lawsuits."

Comments

Re:And impact employment and insurance?

[Pojut]

Companies owned by fundamentalist christians, mormans or even muslims may decide to do this.

Which is silly, considering alcoholic drinks were first conceived by holy men...

No need for police to ask if you drank tonight.

[xC0000005]

Officer:"License and registration, please."
BEEP
"I see you had three martinis, two shots and bought a bloody mary for the dishwater blonde who dumped you to go to the park with the accountant."
You: "It tells you all that on my license?"
Officer: "No, I gave them a ticket for having sex in public while being ugly a few minutes ago. Now, step out of the car and put your hands behind your back."

In Soviet Russia

[EllisDees]

Err, no, in Ohio actually. Around here there are a few bars that have taken to scanning the magnetic strip in our drivers license. Lucky for me, I have a few of those super strong neodymium magnets and have completely negated said magnetic strip.

They usually give up after about 15 swipes.

Re:God dammit

[Architect_sasyr]

You mention having two drinks and driving home up there, and people I talk to get their panties all in a wad

There's a fairly standard joke out here in Australia about you Americans and your drink (actually there is heaps of them) let me relate two:

"If I drank this much in America I would be an alcoholic, in Australia I'm a fucking legend"
"What do a fisherman in a boat and American beer have in common? They're both close to water"

So I'm almost completely off topic, but just wanting to point that out.