In my city we spent $1.6 billion on a new ticketing system for the trains. We replaced paper tickets with smartcards and now they can tell where people get on and off. So, question: how is that worth $1.6 billion?People say its the government being incompetent, and ok. But this is happening all over. All the transit networks are getting smartcards, the grocery stores are taking your name, the airports are getting face recognition cameras. Those cameras, they dont work when people try to avoid them. Like, they can be fooled by glasses. We KNOW theyre ineffective as anti-terrorism devices, but we still keep installing them.All of this stuffthe smartcards, the ID systems, the anti-congestion car-tracking techall of it is terrible at what its officially supposed to do. Its only good for tracking the rest of us, the 99.9% who just use the smartcard or whatever and let ourselves be tracked because its easier.Im not a privacy nut, and I dont care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD theyre all working for that data, how much money theyre spending, and how they never admit thats what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.
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About Max Barry, Lexicon
Max Barry, Lexicon.