(2 votes, average: 5 out of 10)
Loading ...Secure in Anne’s World
Flashback to a New York City trip a couple years ago. I was passing through U.S. immigration at Pearson, and getting a look from the border guard that could only be described as “askance.” (If you’ve ever gotten that look from an INS official, you’ll know what I mean.) My paperwork came back to me in a big red clipboard, which, I soon discovered, is Not Good.
I was ushered off to a small, secure anteroom off the immigration hallway, with rows of seating that might accommodate 50-odd, but were on this day pressed into service seating one. A strapping young uniformed lad sat at a computer, maintaining an impressively indifferent attitude to his only, um, customer. He left me to squirm for about 15 minutes before calling me up.
“Take off the sunglasses,” he demanded. I did. A camera flashed.
“…” I said.
“Right forefinger.” He scanned my print.
“…” I said.
“Okay, you can go.”
I mustered up as much righteous indignation as is safe to do so with immigration officials. I demanded (okay, meekly inquired) to know why I’d been recorded in the INS database. Was it because my passport had recently been replaced?
He shrugged. “Could be. Could be something somebody heard. Could be it was just your turn.” (”Could be,” my travelling companion lectured later, “that joke you made waaaaay back in the lineup about smuggling shellfish.”)
I think of this because I’ve received a press release about a secure social networking site for girls aged seven to 15 called Anne’s Diary. The site offers, among other things, a secure online diary and scrapbook. Once parents approve a child’s account, parent company Anne’s World (it’s an Anne of Green Gables theme, BTW) sends along a fingerprint reader to secure the account.
I have a 10-year-old girl, and I think she’d love the site. But the biometric aspect is a quandary. On the one hand, it’s a technology that will only become more prevalent in the future, so she might as well get used to it now. On the other, should a 10-year-old have biometric information stored in a database?
When I tell the story of the immigration incident and get on my high horse about being logged in a database, I often get the smug argument: “Well, if you haven’t done anything wrong, what are you worried about?”
That’s not the point. The point is, in fact, that I HAVE done nothing wrong, and arbitrarily taking my biometric data and storing it in a database is a violation. Actually, Point 2: If in any way this contributed to my speedier passage through immigration, maybe I wouldn’t be so huffy. But it does not. That biometric information has never been used in the context in which it was gathered. (Insert sound of me getting off my high horse here.)
I’m interested to hear how others feel about the subject. Is there an inherent privacy/security issue in story a 10-year-old’s biometric information in a database? Is it really necessary to have our biometric information stored in the number of instances it might be? Am I overreacting in that civil libertarian tradition? Should I just have kept my mouth shut about the shellfish already? Comment away …
