MSNBC reports in its 31 March piece, Profiling by grocery receipts? that the US government is skirting laws prohibiting the gathering of data about citizens by relying on data — credit card receipts, grocery receipts and similar — collected by private companies. In theory, the data mining is to profile potential terrorists among us. Two huge problems: we don't know it works and the government is deliberately skirting laws designed to prohibit this very action.
Third problem: relying on databases maintained by profit-maximizing companies. Companies don't gather accurate data; they rightly gather sufficiently accurate data. At a certain point more accuracy is too costly to meet a company's goals. That's entirely different than maintaining a secured database for who is permitted entry into a sensitive location. Different set of trade-offs. So determining who boards a plane and who is a threat and who is detained for questioning on the basis of company-maintained data is just plain foolish. (Not to even touch on the problem of people who share the same name.)
Posted at April 2, 2003 01:58 PMI find myself sometimes tempted to go to a cash-only life just because all the ease with which my very movements can be tracked based on my purchasing habits is really kinda creepy.
The thing is, it's not really a simple thing anymore, to go off of plastic completely.
Posted by: janni on April 9, 2003 09:28 PM