Jay's Expose

The conversation that I brought to the dinner table this week was quite an interesting one. “Where will we be in 20 years in terms of identification?” This was the question I posed to my friends as they leaned in to ponder the quandary. The logical response that I got was, “Well, what do you mean?” I continued on to explain what I meant. In the last few weeks there’ve been recent events surrounding Equifax and their large data spill. With huge amounts of personal data open to the public, it is becoming increasingly less reasonable to expect something like a Social Security Number to uniquely identify a person. Imagine how easy it would be to learn someone’s Social Security Number and use it to impersonate them. Which begs the question, “What should we use to identify people?” In India they think they have it figured out. Scans of a person’s fingerprints and iris are hashed together to uniquely connect each person to an ID number. There is no way to look up the person in coordination with their name, but they can trace a face and connect it to an ID number. This shows things like whether or not someone is a citizen or if they’ve already signed up for a program. A portion of the iris is saved and pieces of each of the 10 fingerprints are spliced together; it’s almost like taking a fingerprint of a fingerprint. This way they don’t have to try and make the data that they obtain completely secure. Rather, the government can decrease the value someone would gain in obtaining access to the information. The question is never if someone will hack into a database but when. Knowing this to be true, it is wise to decrease incentive of hacking into the database. In the future of America, there will likely be companies that fight for the opportunity to be the unique identifying force. If you have that status, you basically control a big part of the economy. No one will be able to identify people apart from through your company.* Some companies already seem to be on their way to this reality. A lot of information is necessary in order to recognize faces. The facial recognition software that is been becoming increasingly more popular could also play into this idea. The race is on for companies trying to become the means of identification for people in America.

It is an important part of a government to know their constituents and to be able to identify who their citizens are. Some governments that are smaller and can’t afford to do it themselves will outsource identification methods, but this could go very wrong if a war were to break out and the country that had all of the identities in a database were to withhold the information from the country who used them as a resource. Countries like America would prefer to do it themselves, but that doesn’t mean that they would likely keep this type of job within the realm of the state. In the future, we could very possibly see companies forming a monopolies or even duopolies to take over the game of identification. Who knows how we’ll be filling out our government forms in the year 2050. Surely someone is out there right now trying to figure that out.

*Ideas based on seminar discussion with David Eaves