Arlington TX Police Requesting Thumbprints for Checks
Arlington Texas police proposed Operation Thumbs Up, a voluntary initiative for local merchants to collect thumb prints with checks, as a deterrent to forgery. This has a couple of civil liberties and privacy implications:
It highlights the growing problem of identity theft. Unfortunately, identity theft cannot be solved by the seemingly perfect solution of biological identifiers, such as fingerprints, because identity theft can actually involve several intervening forms of identification that eventually associate a fingerprint with a different identity. This process can easily begin with a social security number, which is supposed to be very private but is in fact requested by businesses regularly. Identity theft is practically a difficult crime to prevent, but the solution is implausible unless it keeps identity more private, not less.
It also mentions the growing problem of surveillance databases, which in this case is a database of citizen fingerprints. Without this type of database, collecting fingerprints with checks is almost useless. Unfortunately, like many other databases used by the police and other government departments, they do not take into account the due process rights of the citizens whose records are being added or modified.
[Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Privacy Digest]
3:16:09 AM 
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