Trying to Reach You
I was reading about the uproar over the proposed ID cards earlier this week.
ID cards will remove my anonymity?
I have two phone numbers, 4 email addresses, a postal address, two bank cards, a driving licence, a company ID card, a travel ID card, a website, a national insurance number, an NHS number, an employee number, an electoral roll number, several store loyalty cards, and my computer is host to any number of tracking cookies and spy-ware registry settings at any one time (despite the fact I regularly get rid of them). None of these are very private, most appearing on semi-public domain places, or are available by sticking your head in my dustbin. Or just by pretending to be official, and asking me. Any and all of these can be, and are used, to track my location, actions, shopping habits, browsing habits and political leanings.
What anonymity?
Your only anonymity these days is a safety in numbers approach. Information on you exists in more places than you could possibly imagine. Your only hope for not being relatively anonymous is the fact that there are so many other people with information in those places too.
ID cards will remove my anonymity?
I have two phone numbers, 4 email addresses, a postal address, two bank cards, a driving licence, a company ID card, a travel ID card, a website, a national insurance number, an NHS number, an employee number, an electoral roll number, several store loyalty cards, and my computer is host to any number of tracking cookies and spy-ware registry settings at any one time (despite the fact I regularly get rid of them). None of these are very private, most appearing on semi-public domain places, or are available by sticking your head in my dustbin. Or just by pretending to be official, and asking me. Any and all of these can be, and are used, to track my location, actions, shopping habits, browsing habits and political leanings.
What anonymity?
Your only anonymity these days is a safety in numbers approach. Information on you exists in more places than you could possibly imagine. Your only hope for not being relatively anonymous is the fact that there are so many other people with information in those places too.
posted by Sarum at
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
6 Comments:
I think that's pretty much the point - in the current system there's no single point of failure, and no single central authority which can monitor/review/maintain all your identification information. To each of the people in your list, your "other personas" with all the other bodies are entirely unconnected (and unconnectable) with the info that they hold on you. I'm guessing that's probably the reason you have so many e-mail addresses - you don't want the spammers to know your real one so you pretend to be someone else as far as they're concerned.
If ID cards come in, the banks, building societies, employers, doctors, councils, shops, etc will still need to hold their own databases on your info anyway (and to exactly the same level of detail they do now too), but they now have ID number attaching to it. Any unscrupulous, irresponsible or negligent body could have its private data on me tied up with another body's in ways I might not want to happen - if for no other reason than I do not want to be advertised at, and will do anything I can to foil marketing systems (e.g. I refuse to have a store loyalty card).
You might find this of interest - a somewhat different slant on why ID cards are a bad idea.
I'm a bit of a hypocrit on this. I'd strongly defend my right to be 'anonymous' online. To take on any personality I choose in games and suchlike, and not to have to tell everyone I'm 23, male, live in Leeds and so on (which as been proposed to combat those nasty men we know infest chatrooms looking for 3 yr olds to have sex with). Most of my close online friends do know who I am "in real life" as the terminology goes.. but I strongly maintain that who does and doesn't know this information should be up to me.
However, I don't really care if someone wants to keep my information in a government database. (Although The Registers point about the fact the Home Office haven't really thought about this enough is quite valid.. but also to be expected. We both work with project managers who don't really think about things enough, surely you didn't expect the government to be any different?)
I think that probably quite backwards. But there you go, that's me.
Whilst I agree with some of the above, you've gotta admit it would be pretty cool to have your eye in a card in your wallet. And it's always a lot of fun to look at people's photos on cards too!
My eye is much more useful in my head than in my pocket.
Lint - that's worse than the joke the "world's bounciest actuary" cracked in my presentation yesterday! Remind me to avoid telling you at some point in the future.
Sarum - I agree that the Government haven't got a clue about what they're doing, and no, I would never have expected them to. But they're using my money to do this, and so they need to tell me some good reasons why I should be happy with that. I have heard none, and very few even attempts at giving some. So far the best has been "If we don't have ID cards, the terrorists/asylum seekers/IRA/violent criminals/*insert scaremongering-friendly group du jour here* will eat our children and steal away our garden gnomes."
This is just too big a project to be going on without any kind of planning, expenditure control or attempt to obtain customer buy-in. And that bugs me too!
I agree about that. The right to anonymity argument aside (it's one I've never fully understood, even if that makes me something of a hypocrite sometimes) there are still plenty of reasons why it's not a good idea... or even if it is a good idea, why the way they're going about it is bad.
To open a complete different can of worms, in some small sense it's like the EU Constitution. There are probably 1001 good reasons for doing something *like* that... however the way it's being done, and the fact that the general public know next to nothing about it, but are expected to vote on it, is nothing short of a disaster. I do believe (I think) in better integration in Europe (and the world as a whole really, but that's somewhat unrealistic)... I'm far from convinced the current draft constitution is the best way of going about it.
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