Imagine you had a locked briefcase, handcuffed to your arm, with all your secrets in it and only you could open it. Nothing short of a subpoena with a defined reason and approved justification could compel you to share any content of the briefcase against your will.
The same could be said of my private parts.
In an earlier, more-innocent age, no respectable citizen (e.g., airline passenger seeking to board his flight) would have been compelled to undergo an "intimate" body search. Even a light frisking would have been viewed as outrageous. But now, even small children and 80-year-old nuns are required to undergo a frisking and/or mm-wavelength scanning - and we are only one short step away from full-blown cavity searches.
We all know the reasons for this - but it is still something that we should not grow accustomed to.
My concern is that this "digital wallet" would soon come to be taken for granted. One major terrorist incident, and there would be calls for requiring that a "backdoor" be installed. And even if that weren't the case - more and more places of business and/or govt. offices would simply deny service unless you were willing to "drop your pants."
"See! We aren't infringing upon your privacy rights! It's just that, if you want to mail a letter, you've got to give us access to your digital wallet!"
Regards,
Thanks for that, and you are absolutely right.
The digital pants down is a risk obviously but too many people just accepted the post-9/11 TSA panty raid as a reasonable response to nobody from Iraq being involved in a joint Saudi / Afghan wahabbi inspired terror attack where the Saudis were too rich and well-organised to kick their a55e5 and for that reason we are where we are.
I think the market will provide an answer to this. COVID has shown this to some extent.
Employers in the UK who insist on unnecessary COVID tests while also insisting that everybody get back to 2 hour commutes to a sweaty open plan office are seeing their vacancies going unfilled even after offering to pay for the season ticket or onsite parking.
What berk is going to sign up for that when the company over the road is offering the same salary, but with 40 hours a week working from home, a $3k allowance to kit out your home office, and only one mandated office day a month? A canny person can get all their hours done by Thursday lunchtime, have 12 hours of paid overtime, and still do less hours than they’d have done in the old place.
Same will happen for travel and other things. If people are too inconvenienced by unnecessary tests, they’ll go elsewhere.
If the state starts being intrusive but in a less intrusive way than the way my bank keeps pestering me to use the full Monty multifactor combination of app + fingerprint + card + pin + name of payee every time I want to transfer payment to a new third party, they’ll tolerate it.
And that’s probably the biggest long term risk. “It’s no hardship” + “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”.