Jackolantern
Registered Users (C)
Apart from the inconvenience (not to mention the hygiene issues from touching a specific spot that 1000 people a day carrying foreign viruses and bacteria have touched), it is not so much the fingerprinting itself but what the government can do with them once the technology improves to the point where you can be uniquely identified in a second from your prints using inexpensive devices.
As fingerprinting becomes required for one thing, it becomes easier to convince people to allow implementation for something else. People start to think, "they already do it for X, so why not Y?" You personally have already demonstrated that attitude ... "they already do fingerprinting at the DMV, so what's wrong if they use it at the airport?". That incremental tolerance is why it needs to be opposed long before it gets used for expansive and intrusive purposes; by the time it gets to that point, it is probably too late.
Each additional use of fingerprints puts us another step closer to a Gattaca-like society where you have to give fingerprints as you turn every other corner. Once they can track your movements to that level of detail, they can start constructing profiles of different types of criminals based on those movements, and you can become a suspect merely based on fitting that profile of movements, even if you are innocent. And they can use it to control your movements as well ... after a crime, they can just order the fingerprint system to disable access to buses, trains, banks, schools, libraries, etc. for everybody within a given radius who fits the profile of the suspect(s).
It is true that a similar thing may happen if facial recognition technology ever gets sophisticated enough. But for its usefulness as a unique identifier, that lags way behind fingerprinting; facial recognition software still has a nontrivial error rate, and even identical twins have different fingerprints. So fingerprinting and/or its close cousin, retina scans, are far more likely to be the choice of technology they will try to implement bit by bit and get citizens to accept each additional use of it.
Last edited by a moderator:
