Privacy–
Today is a sad day. If you apply for a passport, from now on your fingerprints will be added to it. If the fingerprints were only on the passport itself, I would not have been bothered to much. But no, our government has decided it should be kept in a central database.
They have made legislation that that database can only be used for certain goals. But you know, when the database starts growing, it gets attractive to link to unidentified criminal fingerprints. Maybe not by this governement, but the next one or the one after that.
I regret not realising it last week, I could have renewed my passport.
See also this article.
Hi Toma,
I live in Germany. Here I missed the possibility to get a passport without RFID on it two years ago. Last year they added the fingerprints. They also want a card for health care and to have a biometric id card here in Germany. I feel very uncomfortable.
Please bear in mind, that the fingerprints are not the worst thingie. I think the photo on the chip and in the database is more harmful than the fingerprints. The fingerprints are scary because everyone connects that to thieves and burglers. But even more scary is that your photo is stored in a database in digital format.
If you are concerned about privacy, please talk to members of the European Parliament, to politicians and your friends. Consider going on the street like we here in Germany do: http://www.freiheitstattangst.de/
Best wishes from Germany.
foobar
A sad day indeed. You should see what they’re lining up for forced H1 N1 vaccination, though. That’s the *really* scary stuff. Try looking up the history of the “adjuvents” is *does* contain, and the company Baxter who manufacture it.
Maybe I’m wrong, if yes please advise, but I do not see any problem except for people which fingerprints might already be in an “unidentified criminal fingerprints database”.
And it that case, would it not be a good way to improve the poor catching rate of some criminal areas?
No, because when that happens, the rest is predictable: say in 10 years we discover that people who have a certain loop in their fingerprints have an increased chance to get cancer. Would you like to receive a mail saying that based on your fingerprint your life expectations should be lowered? Or do you agree that we pass on that information to your life insurance directly so they can raise your monthly fee? I do not want to provide the government with that information. And remember it is fairly easy to plant your fingerprint on crime scenes. CSI will give you enough examples how to do that (although most of it is bogus in that serie).
I live in the Netherlands too, and renewed my passport last week just to postpone getting my fingerprints in a central database for as long as possible. It’s a shame our government feels the need to create and interconnect more and more databases. And for each database that get’s create you know it will eventually be used for more and more goals. But unfortunately it seems that most people here don’t really care.
Yes the fingerprint thing is very scary, but the user of RFID chips is also a very big problem. Have a look at this fantastic article “How RFID tags could be used to track unsuspecting people”: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-rfid-tags-could-be-used
I add my complain to the ones here!
Replying to Yves I’ll quote you a sentence from Benjamin Franklin
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”