Development of Ideas: Concepts

The use of biometrics would provide a means for the absolute tracking of a populaces actions. In America the collection of facial and fingerprint scans is already taking place throughout airports and borders for every non-national that enters the country. The vast marketing data held on the populaces activities, spending habits, preferences and biases are all being collated and conglomerated into larger and larger databases. Once the biometric information is tied in to that database, the government can track its citizens without their knowledge or consent.

The backlash against this is that people demand a certain degree of privacy, which is reduced in the face of increased security. When technology uses a person as a means of identification and authority, their security and their identity merge. The present climate of terrorist threat has lead directly to the creation of the Total Information Awareness Act, an attempt to unite all national and security databases into one system that can monitor and predict patterns of behaviour, searching for signs of suspicious activity. Though it sounds ideal for a government fighting crime it does raise questions as to whether this removal of privacy is worthwhile to those people who are innocent, who controls the information and for what ends, how is that information maintained and what recourse is there to question the validity of this information. The ID System featured in the Memecom Gateway is my proposition for how such issues might be dealt with and considering the rise of identity theft, what problems might befall both the use of biometrics and any solution that is derived from them.