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Identity Theft & Internet Scams
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| Yes | 51% | 41 votes | Total: 81 votes | |
| No | 49% | 40 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesAlthough chip implantation will making tracking people extremely easy that may not necessarily be a great thing as government agencies start keeping greater checks on people; the privacy of the people is at risk. At first, this may not seem like a huge hassle but a situation can be imagined where such drastic measures can eventually lead to severe limitations of personal liberty, which includes movement as well. Such freedoms are an intrinsic part of us as human beings, over the years many revolutions have taken place for the sake of liberty. The words of Abraham Lincoln still echo in the ears of many of us, "Give me Liberty or give me death". It seems to me that we,as a society, are regressing rather than progressing. Even though in a strictly technological sense of the term we may be moving forward but the tabs which are being kept on people are restricting personal freedom. Services such as the new tracking service offered by Google only seek to further my case presented against the use of technology to track people. What is important here is that the discussion is not limited to the fact that teenagers can easily get tracked by their parents; the discussion seeks to present the possibility of technology being used adversely by those in power to curb the freedom of the people, which is an intrinsic right. The worlds presented in movies such as equilibrium, where people are not even allowed to feel seem far fetched at present but the way these drastic measures are being employed, it seems like a world close to such an extreme is a practical possibility. The idea of which should be alarming to most people so rather than accepting ideas such as chip implantation, we should learn to be more skeptical and look into the real purpose being suggestions of the employment of such ideas. It is easy for the people in power to present an ideology and use their influence to fool the people into believing the false advantages of a particular measure. However, the people should learn to be more critical of such methods deployed against them. They should learn not to accept every new innovation without a proper analysis. The Patriot Act in the United States has come under severe scrutiny due to the limitations it has placed on personal liberty but no change has taken place, infact attempts at curbing personal liberties have intensified. In a day and age where terrorism is used a tool to make sure people live in constant fear and the umbrella term is used as an excuse to reduce personal liberties and even go to war, we should as people learn to fight against the ruling ideology rather than accepting it right away without any inspection. We must learn to think for ourselves.
Learn more about this author, Shehzad Ghias.
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No
Identity theft will always be with us.
Implanting a chip to prove one's identity is, upon first glance, a reasonably sound idea. If your chip has a unique identification code associated with your identity, and you have that identification code, then you must have that identity. The implications are crystal-clear: so long as everyone has a unique identification chip, identities will be clearly delineated, without room for ambiguity, mistaken recognitions, or fraud.
However, this depends entirely upon the ability of an implanted chip to remain unique and impervious to attempts to duplicate it or to copy it. Once any method is invented to do either of these, then chip-based authentication of identity becomes just as vulnerable to theft as any other form of identity authentication.
There are, of course, various ways to make the job of those who wish to copy a chip more difficult. As a chip is, in essence, a miniature computer, various programs can be coded into it for the purpose of ensuring that attempts to 'listen in' on the authentication or to reverse-engineer the chip will be of very limited use for forging a new identity. This is, however, only a way to make it more difficult to steal an identity; it will not entirely prevent this theft.
Even if it is combined with a password or a PIN, chip-based authentication is still vulnerable to time-tested methods of social engineering. An identity thief need only convince their victim that they have a legitimate need for the victim's password or PIN once in order to commit a damaging theft, after all. There are plenty of identity thieves who practise this method every day, 'phishing' for people's bank account information or debit card PINs.
Further, even if a perfect method of authentication could be found-one that uniquely identified every person and was magically unable to be forged or spoofed-the preservation of one's identity would rely, in the end, on the wits and intelligence of the human identifying themselves. Even with a perfect system, humans are imperfect and are capable of being fooled into giving up their identification to those who wish to use it illegitimately. The weak link in any authentication system will always be the person being authenticated; it does not matter how complex or secure the system is if the person using it does not use it properly or allows their credentials to be misused or stolen.
There is not, nor will there ever be, a perfect method of preventing identity theft. So long as humans are fallible-which is to say, so long as humans are human-there will always be ways to steal identities. Rather than focusing on creating a perfect system, the focus should be instead upon creating a robust system where the theft of an identity will not ruin the victim's life.
Learn more about this author, Munin.
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