Comment by mikestorrent
14 days ago
> it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer
Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
I dunno where the OP lives but in my part of the US I only get carded at the one store that cards literally everyone as a matter of policy, regardless of how obviously old they are.
Other than that, I’m under 40 and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been carded in the last 10 years on one hand. The fact my beard is mostly grey and I inherited male pattern baldness probably helps. Never had my driver’s license scanned, ever, for alcohol.
My wife on the other hand, who looks much younger than her age, gets carded all the time.
Same here. I've never been carded in my life for alcohol. Neither in a bar nor store. Despite having lived in several countries (none the US though which is kinda weird about alcohol, where I am from we could drink from 16 not 21 like in the US)
When I was young nobody really cared about age verification yet and these days I'm clearly not a teen anymore.
If there would be a store here that cards everyone regardless of age then I will boycott them. It's ridiculous.
OP is wrong. Most places don’t do ID scans in my city. There was one place that did and I do not patronize them anymore.
I think there are some places where vendors have attempted to sell scanning systems as a way to identify fakes and banned patrons. It probably depends on the area how common it is.
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.
My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
America and the "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" / "police don't need body cameras" duality. You really cannot trust the typical person to be attempting cognition.
America doesnt have ID because big businesses and their lobbyists need cheap undocumented labor.
That's the biggest part of it. But there is also grassroots opposition to anything that could be made into or even just rhetorically support the feasibility of voter IDs. And the party which would want voter IDs is also the party which is most spooked about beast numbers and antichrists...
Either way you slice it, almost nobody in America is seriously pushing for a proper federal ID, which is why we're all still abusing SSN cards for this crap.