If only Walt were around to see this: DisneyWorld is scanning customer’s fingerprints. (Story also at BoingBoing.)
I’m posting this not because it’s really within the scope of this blog. I’m posting this because UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT NOW, THIS IS THE FUTURE. And yes, I’m shouting.
How’d you like to be fingerprinted at the mall? In the grocery store? When you vote? In order to buy gas? When you drop off and pick up your kids at school? When you walk into the park?
We already have the “papers, may I see your papers, please” here in North American airports that we used to associate with spy movies set in iron curtained Eastern Europe. How far will it go?
Post this. Talk about it. Raise a stink.
Most importantly, vote with your feet. Vote with your dollars. Refuse to patronize any company that demands privacy violations as a cost of doing business with it. Who is the bloody customer, after all?
When my wife Teresa and I took our kids to Sea World in San Deigo earlier this year, they wanted to fingerprint us as well. I refused, just out of principle. They agreed to just look at my ID. And look in our bags in case we were carrying bombs or guns.
But even that is an invasion of privacy. What we give up arguing becomes the next standard modus operandi. And then the next thing comes along. Pretty soon, we wake up in what looks very much like a police state … just like the lobster who never jumped out of the pot.
The water temperature went up too slowly. They took away our freedoms just one at a time. Death by a thousand tiny cuts.
You want to change that? Start now.
Don’t care enough to resist? Then our children will live in Amerika. In Kanada. In Oceania.
1984, baby.
[tags] disneyland, police state, fingerprinting, privacy, sea world, 1984, george orwell, john koetsier [/tags]