One of the things we did at Council was debate national ID card types of situations in a possible US future where one card would serve as driver’s license, library card, citizenship card, etc. ALA strongly urged the powers that be to be concerned with the privacy implications of such a movement and, at some level, was just against the national identity card idea. In the UK they are grappling with a different sort of privacy issue: fingerprinting children to use their prints as unique identifiers for library cards in schools. Is this another case of solving a problem that doesn’t really exist with fancy gadgetry?
“It’s far more logical to say the number of times a child will lose its library card is relatively small. You ask the child their name and you trust them. What are they saying – that children are going to be masquerading as other students so that they can illicitly obtain books?” [thanks eoin]