Big Brother and now private companies

As technology advances with iris scanning a possibility, but already in place is facial scanning in such places as airports for security...another whole security topic but let's not get side tracked on it...

Example of security tags....my daughter bought a pair of shoes...imbedded right in the shoe was the security tag....the cashier passed them over the pad to nulligy the tag. We then proceeded out of the store and the alarm went off...re-did the one shoe that was the offender 3 times before it stopped triggering the alarm.

Three days later we walk into the store, my daughter wearing the new shoes, and upon leaving the store the danged alarm goes off...culprit was that same right shoe....now my daughter is being acused of trying to shoplift a pair of shoes. We are detained while they view tapes of the shoe area...we aren't on the tapes but still they don't buy the explanation and are detained for further investigation. Finally I am allowed to leave to go home and get the receipt (round trip took 45 minutes plus gas cost)...they check the receipt but as shoes aren't serialized they are arguing that this doesn't represent the shoes in question...finally after successive arguing and my temper rising they find out who was on the chech out register at the time of purchase and proceed to call her at home...she verifies the problem and we are free to go with no apologies from the store. The price: Time involved 3½ hours, cost in fuel for round trip, and totally bad taste in my mouth for the business.

A further step...lets look at Gillette's set up of snapping pictures as customers pick up RFID tagged products off the shelf. Once the picture is taken anf the RFID recorded then the customer is tracked to the checkout...if the customer doesn't pay for the product they will be tagged as they leave the store for a possible theft suspect...even though they may have changed their mind and set the product down again somewhere else in the store, or even took it back to the display...suppose they changed their mind and bought a competitive brand that had a better price....still they will be tagged as not paying for it and possibly stopped for questioning...

BUT..

....that is only the beginning. As more and more invasion of privacy comes along it will worsen. Already the picture laden id's (driver's licenses, health cards, etc) are in a database, and Gillette just took your picture...tied into a database they can now use your picture to get your total info (including medical data) just by accessing the databases that are related to photo id's. These databases for security and supposedly marketing purposes are often sold to third parties....Now you walk into another store and as you enter a reader picks up the RFID and it is auto entered into this store's database, searched, and your whole info file is now on record in this stores database(including priveledged info in medical records, etc)

And the nightmare will just blossom....

....for instance....unknown to the store it has an employee who likes children....this employee sees a little one that he/she fancies and who were scanned by the RFID reader ...this offender now has access to home addresses, phone numbers, etc...then just how safe is the child?

And the nightmare will continue.

Cornell