Speaking Volumes

A long, long time ago I took the LSATS, the required test for admission to law school.  It required a lot of security measures.  Two forms of id, one had to be a picture.  You had to also have a copy of your picture id, as that was going to be collected and kept.  Then, finally, seated in my assigned seat and a test booklet passed out sitting closed in front of me, they came around and fingerprinted every one on their test booklet.  I remember thinking this is just insane.
 
Recently, I read about a primary school near Manchester, England that is trying out a system of using finger prints to replace library cards.  I must admit, I had the same reaction as putting my thumb print on that test booklet so many years ago.
 
I can see the ‘ease’ factor.  You never forget your fingerprints at home.  They are yours, it can’t be denied or confused.  For a child, it wouldn’t require them to carry anything.  But this seems wrong on so many levels.  First, where does one learn responsibility and keeping track of things?  A library card lost is really no big deal.  So let’s work with young people to keep their library cards and not have problems later in life when they loose their credit card. 
 
But more than this, a finger print… Think about this.  A finger print in a database.  Databases are hacked.  Data lost.  Accidents happen…. Once on a online game site I frequent, they ‘host’ server provider was moving  from California to New Jersey. The plan was to transfer all the data from one machine to another.  Unfortunately, the servers they ran  got lost and confused and in a blink of an eye… all the companies and individuals who used this hosting location lost their data.  They tried to find it, put it back together like Humpty Dumpty and return it.
 
For us gamers, it was really no big deal.  A bunch of userids like Troll2,  Tolkien_Fan and passwords for this particular game site.  No one really cared.  But for others… it was their business, people’s credit cards, addresses, phone numbers….
 
We were lucky; the computer company sent a business in the UK what was supposed to be their data.  The business looked at it, recognized it as not their data.  Because there had been online discussions of this whole fiasco by the IT departments of those affected and us geek types, the UK businessman recognized the data as probably ours.  He contacted our site leader (a man in Australia) and sent him a sampling of the data to see if it was ours.
 
It was, and out of the goodness of this businessman’s heart.  He spent 5 hours electronically sending our data to yet a third location so that our site leader could find a new hosting company and restore us.  Very little was lost.  Others not so lucky.
 
This was just some silly accident… what if this were fingerprints?