The New York Times talks about "Finding Pay Dirt in Scannable Driver's Licenses. In most states, driver's licenses now feature bar codes containing remarkable amounts of personal information. While this may help prevent identity fraud, it can also land a driver's name on databases in unexpected places."
Things like this make me really nervous. I agree that it's nice to be able to do things like checking age for clubs. But I don't think that just because I walk into a club that they should be able to send me junk mail. Maybe I don't want them to have my address. Is there any way to prevent them from getting this information? With this system, someone could go to a lot of work to keep information like that private, and then give it out without ever realizing it. On the other hand, it was nice to read that some states are already limiting what information can be stored. I guess I'll have to look into what MA law says. I'm almost tempted to go to The Rack to see what would happen if I asked them to not save my personal information.
