Kidnapping was the crime of the 1980s. Since most of us were children of the ’80s, I don’t need to lecture you about that, but I can remember a time where one could not go into a store without seeing a carton of milk with a lost child’s face plastered on the side. Those little inserts that come with advertising which list a kidnapped child’s information and the television show America’s Most Wanted, are by-products of that hysteria.I certainly am not mocking the sorrow of kidnapping, it is just that the interest in the subject has waned over the years. Today’s interest is school shootings and perhaps that too will pass fad-like into history, replaced by something else appallingly strange.The school shootings of today have caused people to search desperately for solutions. That search usually finds terribly ineffective but idealistic ways of solving the problem in question. The weird solution to the kidnapping phenomenon was fingerprinting. I can remember seeing the little stands as a child, perhaps in first or second grade, set up in front of grocery stores or in libraries by some organization. The idea was to take the identifying characteristics of a child, fingerprint them, and then if the child is kidnapped or becomes lost, the fingerprints would be key in finding them again. I consider myself a well-read person, but I sincerely have never seen a single newspaper article that says that a child has been found because of their fingerprints. It doesn’t take long to figure out why: Fingerprints would only prove that someone had been somewhere. Since dusting is a targeted process, you really wouldn’t be able to make a trail out of them and most likely you won’t be able to find them in the first place. It simply is not what fingerprinting is for.Thankfully, it seems like people have figured this out or no one is interested in fingerprinting children anymore.But that still leaves one question unanswered; where are the fingerprints now? Well, I can tell you where I don’t want them to be but I suspect that is exactly where they are. The big push was to have law enforcement – either local or national – to hold the fingerprints on record. And the funny part is that this is nonsensical. Why should law enforcement need to have the fingerprints? Assuming that there is justification for fingerprinting, let the parents keep them and should the unfortunate occur, the parents could then give the fingerprints to the police. That, however, did not appear to be a consideration. Send them to Virginia and they will be in good hands with the FBI. Maybe this did not happen and they are still maintained in some dusty warehouse somewhere or perhaps they were destroyed because they were completely useless. However, someone should be asking these questions because there are some privacy implications should the fingerprints still exist.For instance, some states like Colorado, Texas and Georgia require fingerprints in order to obtain a driver’s license. What is stopping their public safety departments from taking the database of driver’s fingerprints and cross checking them with the childhood fingerprint database? Driver’s license fingerprinting, which is equally if not more asinine, will hopefully prove to be a fad too. Its usefulness in fraud reduction is non-existent and if mounting opposition in Georgia shows, public concern over the practice is much higher than the Bureau of Motor Vehicles administrators would like to admit.And that is just the tip of the iceberg. If my informal evidence proves correct, there are a lot of people my age who have undergone the procedure; the sheer numbers may be the most frightening part.Perhaps it just shows the madness of the crowd in a troublesome time. But it definitely shows how privacy is sometimes sacrificed for no good reason at all. We should all be worried about that.
James Moyer is a senior Russian and computer information systems major from Twinsburg, Ohio. He is president of the Buckeye Privacy Coalition, a group that can be found on the Web at www.osu.edu/students/privacy.