Kim Cameron (identity guru working at Microsoft) recently began gathering links on a disturbing trend: mandatory (ie, no parental opt-opt) fingerprinting of children, for reasons as trivial as school lunch program identification. Kim is /far/ more eloquent than I in parsing the issues, including a bizarre assertion that consent by the child is sufficient to override parental objection!

For those who need more background, Kim Cameron, Bruce Schneier, and David Brin are all great. For example…part of the issue with biometrics is that they are non-revocable and eternal…I can’t change my fingerprints! That makes them (and SSNs, for that matter) useful identification tokens, but problematic authentification credentials. We do way too much mixing up of the two. This will get worse before it gets better…but there is hope!