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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."
You wouldn't think it was stupid if you were the owner of the convenience store....
That store now has a nice record saying they carefully verified the age of ever customer purchasing alcohol or tobacco. So when some 13 year old gets caught smoking and some "I'm a perfect parent" mother decides to blame the corner store for selling cigarettes to her kid instead of her inability to do her job as a parent, the store doesn't lose its two primary profit centers for 90 days while its license is suspended. It also doesn't have to worry about being sued when some drunken 19 year old gets into an accident and one of the victims tries to go for a jackpot verdict against the store that "sold the alcohol". It probably gets a nice discount on its insurance premium for the trouble too.
The inability to shop for these products anonymously is the price we pay for the "luxury" of living in a litigious society.