Every morning Dennis Colson, a surveyor at New York City's Department of Design and Construction, begins his work day by placing his hand on a scanner to log his time and attendance at the office. The use of hand geometry and other biometric data, like facial and iris recognition, is not new -- the University of Georgia pioneered the use of hand geometry when it installed scanners in its student dining hall in 1974. But the planned roll-out of hand geometry scanners in all New York City government agencies has sparked union cries of "geoslavery" and assertions that technology developed for security will be used to track, label and control workforces. "It's frustrating, it's kind of an insult," Colson, 53, told Reuters. "They are talking about going to voice and retina scanners and that's an invasion of privacy in that they can track you wherever you go." Jon Forster, of the Civil Service Technical Guild, which represents Department of Design and Construction workers, said the biometric systems gave the city a license to obtain personal, uniquely identifiable data to track workers. "It's really a matter of this kind of technology having far outstripped any legislation or even case law in the United States in terms of what are the restrictions," Forster told Reuters. "On the one hand I think people might all agree that if you put a GPS system in ambulances then that's a good thing. On the other hand you have an employer in Ohio who has demanded that two of his employees have chips implanted in their bodies."Yummy--that last part sounds GREAT. I want to be tracked EVERYwhere I go! See, that's where we're headed. In most corporations the bottom line is put at the top of everyone's priorities. The company I temp at is so cheap they won't pay for facial tissue. They already give us more work than we can possibly do in a day, the next logical step would be to make sure we take a certain number of breaks and to make sure we don't dawdle on them (or dawdle while talking to people in other departments) they'll want to track us inside the building to make sure we stay in line. What better way to do this is there aside from fingerprint/iris/palm scanning? There's no pesky card which we might lose (I've lost mine once) and there's nothing invasive like injecting a tracking chip. So, I can see a corporate reality where bigger profits insist that something like this be done. That is, unless we all refuse to put up with it. Of course, refusing to put up with it may not be an option. Engadget.Com posted [http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/08/sarnoff-wants-to-scan-your-iris-without-your-knowledge/|a February 8, 2007 entry] about a company called the Sarnoff Corporation who:
has recently filed a patent application that spells out a snazzy method of quickly photographing a helpless individual's facial region multiple times in order to (hopefully) capture one solid look at the iris. This newfangled manner of jacking biometrics from clueless pedestrians is actually being requested by the American government, as it apparently hopes to use it to run constant background checks with the information on file in order to peg a threat as they're strolling through.So, even if the USG fails to use it, there's no law on the books that says your employer can't set these bad boys up around the work place to spot and ID you without even asking your permission. Isn't Big Brother fun? Tune in to ThePete.Com to learn how the USG is trying to make every American carry the same kind of driver's license and how that's a quiet chipping away at state's rights. Weeeee!
Orignal From: Big Brother Week: BIOMETRICS AND MODERN SLAVERY
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