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The Ugliness of Privacy Notices
Note that the number does not correspond to your passport number, it is "a unique reference ID" that corresponds to your passport data in State Department/Customs databases. Presumably the verifier at the border will see photographs and other information about each cardholder as the scanner detects them.
Let's say you're going to read a book to your kids at bedtime. You could use the paper version of Curious George, which cost $9.95, or the electronic version, which sends the text via WiFi from your computer to a special screen that you read from. It's $29.95.
Which would you use? The paper version, of course, because the relevant part of the bedtime-story experience is the reading of the story, not the transmission of the text to the medium from which it is read.
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Nancy7585@mail.com
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Nancy's point is also a good one--there would be less need to validate the credential in the possession of the individuals crossing the border with the RFID tag version, as the comparison is between the biometric data on file with the issuer and the person attempting to pass, rather than between a card that person holds and the person. The latter is a lot easier to forge than the former.
What are the risks that this creates? It wouldn't be hard for someone to find out your reference ID number, it wouldn't be too hard to social engineer some basic identity information from you to correlate with that reference ID, and it would be possible to do some movement tracking if you had enough readers. Most of those risks could be eliminated with an RF-screening sleeve for the card.
I see this as much less problematic than the RFID tag on the standard passport, which contains the actual personal information.
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