But how much are we *already* measured, controlled, and modelled, with and without our consent?
with consent: air miles card purchases track spending habits in order to sell the individual behaviour to all-too-willing purchasers. without: POS transactions (EC card in Europe, Interac in Canada) are tracked and cross-referenced to each other to generate spending-profile patterms. POS-transaction houses (my wife once worked for one) make the bulk of their money cross-referencing card-based spending patterns with air miles cards and CC cards, generating comprehensive behaviour models for individuals. We didn't really pay attention, but we gave consent to have this happen when we signed up to POS. There are limits in the EU about this, but you have to *know* it is happening in order to complain... with even less: I do not know if thi sis done... Correlate POS/air mile data with card-based mobile phone users, and get real-time positionning of people who are nown to pruchase specific products. So the obvious question is, since we've already given away our privacy, is there necessarily anything wrong improved identity verification to meet current falsification standards? We pay into services through taxation, and we complain about 'foreigners' using up 'Our' services, but we want 'Them' to enforce service-access authentication without having to put up with any means to identify us. I realize that nobody on this list has complained that 'foreigners' (of which I am usually a member) are the Cause Of All Problems, but governements are putting these control points into our lives to deal with 'teh-roh-rists' and 'foreigners'. I submit that we as a population are the root cause of these new authentication demands because we asked for better policing of identity. (of course, I concede that this seems to be getting a bit out of hand).
