Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 2 September 2005, 7:05 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Monday 29/8/2005
Bank Holiday. Jetlag. Nothing to see here. Move on.
Tuesday 30/8/2005
Disaster has struck! Somewhere between Heathrow and home on Sunday morning, my wallet has done a bunk. As I've been mostly asleep between then and now — excepting being mostly awake since Monday evening — my personal neurochemistry seems unaffected by melatonin — I haven't had recourse to the imperial purse before now. Assuming the worst, evil people could have been sucking my finances dry (well, drier) for nearly two days. I know how much damage I can do in that time…
Some feverish phone calls later, the cards have been extinguished and the friendly people on the phone confirm that the parlous state of the Goodwinsian fiscals is still all my own work. Phew. I was a bit put out when one of the outsourced cancelbots said "The last transaction on that account was on April 3rd for £12.49. Can you tell me what it was for?", while thinking it unreasonable of me not to be able to give chapter and verse on the spot. Whoever writes those scripts doesn't really think there may be humans at the other end. They may not be entirely human themselves: you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect dark and tentacled forces at work in retail banking these days.
But why do I need cards anyway? If all these biometrics are so good, do I need anything other than my fingertips, my iris and the ability to say "I am Rupert Goodwins and I claim my fifty quid beer money"? The government has taken to promoting ID cards with the idea that they'll save on ID theft and thus prevent fraud; it rather seems to me that the onus for that is on the financial institutions, who end up paying for it all in the end anyway. And I don't mind using my biometric mojo to identify myself to the bank, which has far stricter limits on what it can do with my data than the vast, amorphous apparatus of state. Of course, if the biometrics don't work well enough for this sort of application then I quite understand — but then why trust them for a fifty million plus national state project of infinite ramifications?
Ah, you know the answer to that. It's not a fingerprint scanner to which I wish to give the finger…
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