With the rise of the internet privacy has become a hot topic. A lot has been said about social media sites like Facebook. People sharing their entire life with the world. Most people probably don’t even realize this or just don’t care. I’d love to see those people try a site like pipl.com and then ask them if it’s really such a good idea to keep everything so public.
But this isn’t the kind of privacy i want to talk about in this post. I want to talk about governments and privacy.
                     
A while ago the EU came up with the great idea to store fingerprints and bio-metrical data on the chip of everyone’s ID card. Now I’m fine with that. However the Dutch government thought “hey, if we’re going to store fingerprints on the chip we might as well store them in a central database.”
And this is what i do have a problem with. The major reason I’m against this is that we don’t know what will happen with that data. It’s the kind of infrastructure nobody should want. Why would you store fingerprints of innocent people? Will it prevent crime? Maybe.

This is where i get to the topic of this post. We have to decide if we want this kind of infrastructure for the price of losing some privacy. The chances of you becoming the victim of a crime committed by someone who would’ve been locked up thanks to this database are tiny. Especially with the minor sentences.
To go back to the topic of airport security i touched on a while back. Let’s assume a terrorist hides a bomb in his behind. Now we could cavity search each person who wants to get on the plane and we would all be 100% safe from assbombs. Only a handful of people would still get onto airplanes and besidesthe odds of being the victim of an attack are once again tiny.
Even if take in account ALL terrorist attacks on airplanes that chances of YOU being affected by that are tiny. Why do we need to increase security then? There will always be a risk.

The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a certain risk to everything you do. Get in your car, cross the street or do some work around the house.
But we all seem to take those risks for granted. Than why do we want all this other security for things that have a minimal chance of happening to you or someone close to you?
The same goes for the fingerprints being stored on the ID cards. It might prevent a few crimes but at what cost? Once they’re stored they never get deleted. Even if the government decides to abandon the project, who knows what will happen to the data that’s be created already?

A while ago someone mentioned how the Dutch government registered every persons beliefs once. The Germans were very happy with that in 1940. And no, this isn’t an overdrawn idea. I’m pretty sure when they started doing that nobody would’ve thought something like the holocaust would or could happen. Yet it did.
Who knows where we’ll be 50 years from now? Maybe you have nothing to hide now but what if laws change under a regime that doesn’t want the best for you? You won’t be able to stand up against it because all your data is already stored somewhere. DNA databases will come.

We have to put an end to it now. Vote for the people who respect your privacy. Way the the loss of privacy against the security you truly gain. Think for yourself.
Don’t believe all the terrorist bullshit they’re feeding you. Just think of the amount of attacks after 9-11. Madrid and London are the only ones that come to mind.
After all those threats and all those warnings. “But the government has stopped a lot of threats early”. Really? Where’s the proof? The odd maniac that got arrested isn’t that.
You could make a pretty powerful bomb with some easily available supplies and a recipe off of google. But it doesn’t happen. Yet we all give up more freedom everyday for a threat we most likely will never see ourselves.

So the next time you hear about a great new plan to protect you from a serious threat think about the odds of it happening to you or any other person. And then decide if it’s worth the price they’re asking.