First, review this fine cautionary tale available here, courtesy of the ACLU:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE
Now, I am no great fan of the ACLU, but credit where credit is due, this piece sums up the dangers of all those clever national IDs, government administered programs, linked databases, and GPS-enabled devices nicely. In fact, just two short years later, much of what is portrayed already exists:
- businesses use caller-ID to recognize phones and link to customer information
- even if the government didn’t give it out, businesses would certainly use a national ID number as a key—just as they use the SSN currently
- your home address, birthday, name, etc. are all already keyed to the current equivalent of a national ID—your SSN
- where you work is almost certainly on file—didn’t they ask the last time you applied for credit or a loan?
- cell phones with GPS currently do broadcast your location to services that request that information—unless you configure them not to
- businesses already assign delivery areas or prices by risk of the neighborhood—as those living near shady areas know—and as crime stats become more instantly available, this can only increase
- as businesses partner to offer shared customer incentives, exchanging information about recent purchases and coupon offers is becoming commonplace
- certainly whether your cards are maxed out is easy—a quick query to each card could do that
And some things, which have not yet come to pass (as it were) are terrifyingly likely:
- currently legislation protects your health care information, but either government-run healthcare or single-payer schemes would require releasing it to the government at the least
- legislation to allow the government to regulate food and lifestyle choices for health is already proposed—once the government’s actually paying for health-care, what will happen
- currently the health-care industry and insurance industry would love to be notified about people’s purchases and force them to sign waivers—unlike them, government can actually enforce such desires
- in our climate of constant fear of terror attacks, does opening travel itineraries to public scrutiny seem farfetched?
Horrifyingly, the only thing which seemed utterly ridiculous was libraries ever voluntarily making your reading choices public. But amazon.com on the other hand…
Clearly some of what is portrayed is fine, even useful, but some is frighteningly Orwellian.
So where should the line be drawn? Where does the scenario presented cross the line from convenience to surveillance? As technology advances it seems increasingly impossible to effectively compartmentalize information, so should we assume that whatever the government knows about us will find its way into private hands? And just how much should the government know about us, anyway?
Discuss amongst yourselves!
The 12 Angry Men Blog 
April 8, 2008 at 2:20 pm
The US is gaining the small town problem of ‘everyone knows your business and you can’t escape your history to start over’ without gaining the small town benefit of ‘everyone knows everyone, so fraud amongst the locals is very difficult’
April 8, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Three keys for your health records until you die,
Seven for mortgages, email and loans,
Nine for the credit cards so you can buy,
One for the dark lords in their halls of stone.
One key to rule them all,
One key to find them,
One key to bring them all,
and to the government bind them.
April 8, 2008 at 8:16 pm
As Jim Cramer likes to say, we have a government by and for the CORPORATION!!! And trust me, Mr. Corporate Entity wants to know as much about you as possible. I see it every day, and I work for a retailer. If Corporate America wants us to head in this direction, it very well could happen, even with the resources of the ACLU fighting it in the courts.
April 9, 2008 at 1:24 am
“Horrifyingly, the only thing which seemed utterly ridiculous was libraries ever voluntarily making your reading choices public.”
Well, not so fast there, sparky. Privatization of libraries appears to be on the increase (e.g., see http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/public_libraries/index.html); can advertising, solicitation for other services, and data sharing with other vendors, including sharing customers’ interests, be far behind? A short step from aggregated data to raw data, and viola, your library list for all to see.
Not next week, but not all that impossible, either.
April 9, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Public libraries are more of the novelty than private ones. Most older library systems began as subscription services. You had to subscribe to the library in order to use it. When other (competing, gov’t funded) libraries rose up, they were named “Free” libraries (i.e. The Urbana Free Library that is familiar to several folks here).
This privatization looks more like outsourcing rather than a real private library. It’s probably a toss-up as to which form is more vulnerable to information abuse — gov’t run or vendor-run. In the former you have untrained staff managing poorly-designed databases, in the latter you have untrained staff managing a possibly-nefariously designed database. Incompetence vs. ill-intent (as far as information guarding). Take your pick.
A real private library has the benefit of having subscriber pressure to implement safety — hopefully eliminating nefarious design — and limiting government procurement rules that, as a matter of policy, result in crappy design and inadequate support.
-AI