But as part of opneing the account I was presented with a choice, either to furnish acceptable photo identification (presumably a state drivers license or a passport, that gets into a whole other thorny debate regarding the Real ID Act) or to answer some questions to which “only you know the answer”. So I was presented with the following questions which I have redacted to protect the ‘innocent’:

Note that the only thing I have given them is a name, a social security number and an address. They obviously have a service from some company like Intellius (very scary company) that then allows them to formulate questions about other people one knows and one’s family members. In the first question they ask where my sister lives or owns property. Then they ask a dummy question about cars one has recently leased or owned, none of which appear in the list. Then another dummy question about someone I do not know. And finally it asks in what month my Mother’s birthday is.

The unsettling thing to me is that if a private company has access to this information, the government certainly has an even better database. Which means they can and probably do put together a “file” on every person in the country. Is that really the kind of society we want to be? It reminds me of the scarier aspects of authoritarian and statist polities in our past. While it doesn’t make that big a difference in the current context, what if this was used by an employer to screen for my religious affiliation, for instance. It allows private actors to quietly discriminate and public actors to pre-scan citizens for surveillance given the probabilities that a certain files profile will be involved in certain proscribed activites, whether they ought to be proscribed or not. A step toward the “Surveillance Society”.

It also means individuals essentially need to manage their public identities in ways that they did not need to consider formerly. It complicates the living of life in an unpleasant way.