the slippery slope of totalitarian technology

[steampunk]

Re: the slippery slope of totalitarian technology

Unless the US Government coerces me into using biometric identification, I see no problem with it. Credit and debit cards were accepted as social norms with the knowledge that those purchases would be stored somewhere. And those of us who were uncomfortable with that had the option to use hard money. As long as there is hard money, we will be fine. As long as a government does not require one type of purchase power, we will be fine.

[renderman]

Re: the slippery slope of totalitarian technology

The trick becomes when these common forms of payment (debit/credit) get some feature creep and you end up with situations like the RFID credit cards starting to show up where a common form of payment can be used well beyond traditional ways.

[liberator]

Re: the slippery slope of totalitarian technology

Example, why does the cable company need my social security number? Thats just one more place for it to get stolen from; and sadly once you have someones name and social you pretty much have their identity.

This is why I quit donating blood many years ago; they started demanding my social security number. At the time the Red Cross was notoriously lax about distributing information, and they used an AIDS test that had a pretty high false positive rate (over 1% as I recall). That's great for keeping blood safe, but pushes a huge risk onto the donor of becoming uninsurable once the information gets leaked. It was a perfect example of no good deed going unpunished.

I have heard that the SSN requirement for blood donation is a US law, but I have never researched it in enough depth to find out if that's true or not. What is true is that every blood drive that I have attempted to donate to in the last 20 years or so (dozens) has demanded my SSN before allowing me to donate, and I have declined to donate every time. Yet they keep spreading the disinformation that donating blood is risk free.

Evidently the need for blood is not urgent enough to relax this requirement which discourages an unknown number of doners, me included.

It is a very slippery slope that brings out all kinds of consequences, intended or not.

[steampunk]

Re: the slippery slope of totalitarian technology

At the time the Red Cross was notoriously lax about distributing information, and they used an AIDS test that had a pretty high false positive rate (over 1% as I recall). That's great for keeping blood safe, but pushes a huge risk onto the donor of becoming uninsurable once the information gets leaked.

They are also required to report the donor who tests positive to the CDC, a law which makes me a little nervous, considering how likely the donor is to receive a false positive. Government lists in general tend to make me uneasy.