Privacy First

In an earlier post of mine, Fingerprint for Beer, I pointed out the extreme lack of privacy laws in Australia where bars were scanning patron’s fingerprints to check a database of known “problematic patrons” and filtering access based on that. This is in stark contrast to what Germany is implementing with their national ID cards.

Starting in late November, Germany began to issue contactless ID’s to its citizens. What is so special about these IDs is that they can relate special information depending on what the ID is scanned for.

For example if you go to a bar, instead of pulling out your ID and showing it to the bouncer you could just scan your wallet over a sensor and on the bouncer’s screen your picture would appear. The bouncer needs to know if you are old enough to go into the bar though right? This can be solved by a simple box on screen that turns green when you are of age and red when you aren’t.

So to recap the bouncer would only have seen your picture and a box that is red or green based on if you are old enough to enter the bar. No other personal information. That means the bouncer has no idea if you are 25 or 45, he does not know where you live, or what your blood type is. This is amazing privacy. It could cut down on stalking (done by crazy employees at certain places) and identity theft.

In my opinion this technology should be implemented everywhere saving the fingerprint scan you had to provide in Australia for that Foster’s (Source)