Philipine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo
Wired
magazine published the article “Digital IDs are more dangerous than you think”
by Brett Solomon, founder of a global conference that addresses human rights in
the digital age. It says that digital identification systems are meant to aid
the marginalized but actually, they are ripe for abuse. More later.
Why am I thinking of the military’s
sloppy intelligence gathering and red-tagging of critics of the present
dispensation?
There is no escaping the fact that the
current coronavirus pandemic and other events have a way of turning us
individual human beings into digital data that could be stored, retrieved,
downloaded, uploaded and deleted like some electronic bits. Out there, there exist
proofs of our being that enable us to engage in certain humanly activities
otherwise not allowed those who cannot prove who they are with only laminated IDs.
Proof of our existence on this planet now requires, in many instances, digital identity. According to what I have read, “Digital identity is the body of information about an individual, organization or electronic device that exists online. Unique identifiers and use patterns make it possible to detect individuals or their devices.”
Yes, individuals and/or their devices.
Else why would I get a notice on my cell phone about when and where I was this
past month, and with pictures of the places at that! I have yet to learn to undo
this creepy stalking.
A city in Metro Manila has an
ordinance requiring visitors to have a QR code that would serve the city’s
contact tracing efforts. So starting February 15, guards in the city’s
establishments “shall implement the NO QR NO Entry regulation.”
A friend mused: “While valuable for contact
tracing in the time of COVID-19, we are naturally suspicious of how this
government will use these tags.”
No microchips yet, I jested. Correct,
she replied, like having GPS in the body, like Jason Bourne (in the movie
trilogy) in whom a microchip had been imbedded and which later had to be torn
out of his flesh.
But remember, early conspiracy
theories circulated in social media had already warned about microchips in the anti-coronavirus
vaccine. Preposterous, yes, but people suffering from pandemic-induced paranoia
became even more fearful of the vaccine. To start with, people already worried about
personal info they had to write on slips of paper before they could be allowed to
go in any public place with a door. Worried because who knows in whose data bank
the gathered info will end up.
But this much is true, we are
increasingly moving into some kind of Orwellian future where Big Brother is always
watching. Not so unlike the ubiquitous CCTV cameras that while being a boon to
crime solving and prevention they also caused people’s privacy to be
compromised.
I just received my Quezon City online digital
ID that pops up on my phone screen with a tap. It has a QR code while my UMID card
has only a bar code. Suddenly I thought of the chips in ATM and credit cards that
may also be carrying so-called identifiers. And that somewhere out there are imprints
of ourselves stored in some data bank—the whorls on our thumbs, the design in
our irises, the contours on our faces—that had been captured for some temporary
ID and data base while we were in this or that high-security gathering abroad or
on a cruise ship. Next, our DNA.
Solomon writes: “From airports to
health record systems, technologists and policy makers with good intentions are
digitizing our identities, making modern life more efficient and
streamlined…But as someone who has tracked the advantages and perils of
technology for human rights over the past ten years, I am nevertheless convinced
that digital ID, writ large, poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of
any technology that we have encountered.” Over time, he adds, the risks will
become more severe.
“For starters, we are building near-perfect
facial recognition technology and other identifiers, from the human gait to
breath to iris. Biometric data bases are being set up in such a way that these
individual identifiers are centralized, insecure, and opaque. Then there is the
capacity of geo-location of identifiers—that is the tracking of the digital
‘you’—in real time. A constant feed of insecure data from the Internet of
Things may well connect you (and your identity) to other identities and nodes
on the network without your consent.”
There is more to send shivers down our
spine. #
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