At 03:57 PM 12/19/2002 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 04:56:12PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote: | I think this would help, but I also think technology is driving a lot of | this. You don't have to give a lot more information to stores today than | you did twenty years ago for them to be much more able to track what you | buy and when you buy it and how you pay, just because the available | information technology is so much better. Surveilance cameras, DNA | testing, identification by iris codes, electronic payment mechanisms that | are much more convenient than cash most of the time, all these contribute | to the loss of privacy in ways that are only partly subject to any kind of | government action (or inaction) or law.
But you *do* have to provide a lot more information to your bank than you used to, and to your mailbox company, and to the government-run post-offices that can bully private mailbox companies around, and to hotels, and to driver-safety-and-car-taxation enforcers, and to airlines, because governments either require them to collect more, or encourage them to collect more data, and to collect it in forms that are easier to correlate than they have been in the past,
Yep. A lot of it, however, freeloads on the government certification of identity. Without the legal threats, it would be much harder to assemble the data. (Other things, like credit, also become much harder. That may become less of an issue as id theft makes credit visibly a two-edged sword.
While some of it is freeloading on the identity certification, much of it is done because it's so cheap to do so they might as well, and it's cheap because of the government regulations as well as because computation keeps getting radically cheaper. Some of it's also because of algorithm developments for credit scoring, which has revolutionized the credit business almost as much as Black-Scholes or online credit card authorization. Much of that work was done by Fair and Isaac, who commercialized their Operations Research theory. (As someone who did O.R. a long time ago, before the field got radically changed by Karmarkar's work and cheaper computers, it's kind of fun to see that somebody made some money on it :-)
