RFID CHIPS ARE THE DEBIL!

I like when people say this because it is NEVER true. "I'm done with you forever I'll be right here if you want to continue."

Ah the reasonable response: YOU'RE A CHILD MOLESTER.
I know, I know, you're not saying he's a child molester, you're just saying he's like a child molester.

Some bizarro fantasy land child molester that can't find or follow children unless RFID chips are involved I guess?

Guys we need to get rid of seat belts, what if a CHILD MOLESTER uses one to capture a child!!!???

Guys if we keep giving vaccinations to babies CHILD MOLESTERS will know which of us are babies!!!

So would you support a law enforcement DNA database with mandatory compliance for all current citizens, with cells harvested at birth or upon gaining citizenship going forward?

As long as it's run by ethical and honest officials, you mean. Because only then would citizens be able to participate in real democracy. We could even stamp each persons vote with their DNA tag (not the vote itself of course, just the date and time they entered a booth for cross-referencing against the date and time stamp of each vote when honest officials deem it necessary) just to be sure everyone gets a fair shake!

I am not certain what the downside to that would be. What's the catch?

I agree that this is true; I don't agree that it's necessarily right to the extent that we do it currently, and I definitely don't agree that it's right to the extent that Nute et al propose to do it.

Furthermore they have additional rights to privacy in some cases that adults do not; for instance many times minors' names are not given in criminal proceedings either in the news or on public record.

Yeah, I don't know if people will always care about their privacy in the same way they did ten years ago or today or ten years from now. I think as people offer more about themselves online, in terms of pictures of their children, broadcasting their physical location, et cetera, the need to put all our heads together and decide what we cherish about private information and why. Maybe as we go forward, and people get used to having their whereabouts and buying habits tracked and shared amongst major corporations, they will decide that access and accuracy are more important than privacy, maybe not.

Privacy is a right, and people might value it in speeches, but they excercise it about as often as they do the right to free speech or to remain silent. Seldom, and never when it might actually help.

The data can be easily used to discriminate against you, used as leverage or to otherwise harm your public image. And even ideally ethical and honest officials don't guarantee this data won't be ever (illegally) acquired by people lacking such ethics and honesty.

But if we all knew what everyone else was masturbating to, it wouldn't be a problem. It's only a problem when a few people know what you look at when you masturbate.

From a pure data standpoint, I think a full surveillance state would be fascinating to figure out what people actually do, instead of asking them and getting bullshit back. From a rational human being standpoint, everything else about it is fucking terrible, and no amount of ethical people in charge when it's established would make it suddenly a good idea.

Basically I'm terribly fascinated by what people do and why, because it's usually confusing as shit to me. But satisfying my intellectual curiosity via crazy levels of universal observation is not a good reason to implement bad policy.

I'm guessing that's sarcasm but just in case -- knowing what other people masturbate to can certainly be a problem, when the reaction to that knowledge is some variant of "eeew, furries". Granted, not the best example as the furries are perhaps the first ones to tell it to the whole world themselves, but there's lot of people out there who hide personal info because some part of what they are may trigger discrimination and/or persecution. And we already condescend, discriminate against and persecute aplenty as it is.

If everyone knew what everyone else was masturbating to, I think it wouldn't be that much of a problem because the concept of embarrassing kinks disappears with openness. I think Suzanne Brøgger wrote something about that. It's a pretty interesting mental experiment, as impossible ideas tend to be.

The thing is, the idea to a right to privacy is a protection against abuses by those in power, so any thought experiment that start with "If there are fair and honest officials" is a non-starter. American Democracy has a lot of text that details protections from the government (not by the government). Almost all of the Bill of Rights, for example. We know humans are flawed, and that people will take advantage of any power they have over others (whether they intend to or not).

Basically, any information an authority collects has to be used, or they might as well not collect it (as, when it's collected, someone else can take it and abuse it, and then gov't has done a disservice). However, as the information is used more and more broadly (more eyeballs on the database) the potential for abuse grows wider and wider. So, you have to strike a balance between using the information you collect efficiently (is it worth the cost, both in $ and in dignity) and making sure that it cannot be misused.

Given this, if you can't think of potential abuses an authority having many, many samples of a person's DNA would lead too, you are much too credulous. Get more cynical. DNA is admissible as evidence in a court of law. That's a freebie.

Also, if we made charts that showed what everybody was masturbating to, I'm pretty sure that people would start masturbating to that chart. Which would lead to a feedback loop.

I can see where this is coming from, but I don't think that's accurate prediction, based on our track record. Whether information is out in the open or not, this doesn't seem to really shape our opinions about it much, per se. As example, consider racial and/or gender prejudices -- information about everyone's race and gender is there out in the open, and it's been like that for literally thousands of years. But everyone knowing what everyone else's race/gender is didn't prevent prejudice, discrimination and all the funny stuff that occured and still occurs daily, based on this data.

Ideally from a data driven perspective, we'd have a far more honest discussion about what was and was not acceptable in both sexual and other habits. But again: not a reason to implement bad policy! This is just my logical self being permanently annoyed at things like "I never had sex until I was married!" from people you absolutely knew had sex well before that and are just not willing to cloud the debate with facts and reality. Same deal with drugs and plenty of other things that people conveniently retcon out of their lives.

*mutter* We're pretty flawed as a species, and I'm terribly curious about how much of the whole silent majority thing is bullshit versus real. But I figure that's my version of Heaven: when I die and meet whatever deity, I get to ask them questions about what the hell was actually going on.

The gnomes and unicorns keep splitting the fantasy creature vote with them so it's very hard for them to get elected.

Naivete is having optimistic hopes for someone or something, despite lack of evidence for it. What you're doing here is believing something that is patently false, based on a mountain of clear evidence.

In other words, you're not naive. You're just an idiot.

To be fair, "they have a reason for doing so" is usually true. It's just overlooking that reason can often be as simple as "for the lulz".

To reiterate:

Wait, what happened with the helium thing?

"Son, why does your RFID say you were in the janitor's storeroom?"
"I dunno, I wasn't, I believe we are at an impasse."
"So we are... How about I issue you a new tag, and stick your old one in my desk, then lock it. Surely then you won't be having any adventures."

DURRHURRHURR.

No. To track truancy all you need to do is collect the number of times they've passed by a door scanner. Odds means they're in the room, evens mean they're outside of the room. Add a date/time stamp and you have granular information about absences, times late, and time spent outside the room. You don't need to know where a person is to know that they're not where they should be.

I really hope this was sarcasm, because if that's the way you think the school administration works for punishment... *shakes head*.

You already carry around a transmitter reporting your whereabouts to interested parties 24/7, and all of your tracking data can be pulled without a warrant. It's called a cell phone.

Whining about a 1m transmission of an ID number, is beans compared to a multi kilometer transmission of location, calling patterns, 24 hours a day.

Privacy is kind of quaint in the Facebook four square twitter generation.

Voluntary vs involuntary, your cellphone company versus your school administration (one has the capability to screw you out of a hundred bucks, the other can have you expelled), etc etc, shitty comparison is shitty.

Except I don't, nor do my children. Try again.

Did

Did you use the Internet to post this? Your ip is geolocated to a certain degree of accuracy.

Proxies are really really easy to use, and so is Tor, if you want to obfuscate your geographical location.

Not to mention, using cell phones or the internet is voluntary. Going to school, not so much.

Hey guy, I might have had experience with asshats in high school. Yeah, that's pretty much how they do things.

Really? For me, it was more "Hey, some kid said that you did <thing>, so we're giving you detention."

And of course, it didn't matter if the claim contradicted what other people said or was flatly impossible. Because that's far too much effort for the school administrator to actually give a fuck about.

Do you work at a job that requires a keycard? Do you have a bus pass? Do you homeschool your kids? Do you pay cash for everything? Do you have an address, do you use municipal services like sewage and trash? Do you have a retirement plan, bank account, or stock? Do you pay taxes, enroll in selective service, get a high school diploma?

Logically, any interaction with other people requires surrendering a degree of privacy, leaving evidence, a way for the other party to get back to you. As the world gets more complex, more avenues of information open up. If you want complete privacy, you can always get a P.O. Box in Alaska and homestead, but those days are mostly long gone. 50 years from now they will seem as quaint as mcCarthy era fears of a social security number.

Jesus fucking christ, are you people really going to town with this reductio ad absurdum shit? The man said he's uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy inherent in RFID chips, not that he wants to drop off the grid and live like a caveman.

Might be a difference in school systems, or administrators. But one of the nice things about RFID stuff is it's pretty easy to verify.

So is asking a teacher whether a kid was actually in class, rather than spraying graffiti, but my friend got suspended anyway because the principal was too goddamn lazy to even ask the teacher.

Also, if you put no trust in the RFID system (which you shouldn't, because it's super easy to mask, clone, spoof, or change) then the system itself is completely useless. Untrusted information is no information.

My point had little to do with school, but was trying to get at the point that unless you are operating in a highly regulated environment like HIPAA with serious penalties for the breach of privacy, the current consensus is that you have no privacy.

Worrying that someone could track a kid off campus because of his RFID tag is a trivial concern. Eyeballs can do that too.

I'm afraid the Terminator is going to come get me.

If you want to take the "but administrators are, as a rule, lazy" then fair enough, but on this point you're full of shit. It is trivially easy to verify, as I just got finished explaining. Another completely valid method is to simply search for inconsistencies: a student cannot be in two rooms at once, a student cannot exit a room without first having entered the room, a student entering a room and staying there overnight is probably not legit. Simply duping an RFID would cause very obvious signs of tampering, to the point where searching for them could be completely automated.