Big Brother is here: part 2

As a foreigner with a permanent retirement Visa, I have several ID cards with digital information (fingerprints and photo) here.

I am amazed at the number of computers that I am now on when I went to get my immigration renewed: police, neighborhood, post office, and several immigration computers. Most of them also required fingerprints.

When I traveled thru China, I needed to get photo and a visa just to stay in the transit lounge for 12 hours (plus a whole body scan).

So theoretically if there is a war, they know where I am.

Since last year, the Philippines has had a "universal" identification card for everyone.




and overlapping this governmental ID we are getting into e commerce stuff here.

Now the malls are starting to accept e-money. And of course we have had ATM's for years.

I am old and don't quite trust these things. I always used a credit card (and had to replace mine several times after they were hacked or my purse was stolen), but my husband Lolo didn't use credit cards, but carried cash: lot of older folks like him still do, which is why you periodically read about old folks having their life savings confiscated at airports or stolen by thieves).

So I use credit cards, but I am still suspicious of using e money and worry about hackers stealing my ID which is in all these computers: Heck, even my US Federal OPM (employment) file was hacked a couple years ago by the Chinese hackers.

But they are starting to use e commerce, since cellphones have been everywhere for the last 20 years, and now they are building a 5G infrastructure: Manila in 2018, and now expanding all over.
It's Chinese, of course, meaning they can spy even more on us.

And only a few "green" types like Kuya refuse to put the towers on our farm land because he distrusts them being safe.

cellphone and microwave towers are all over the place of course, and there are similar worries by anti tech types about radiation from these and from cellphones: worries that are pooh poohed by experts. And 5G towers put out more low frequency waves than cellphone towers.

and the bad news for us: We have one of these towers down the street where there is one of the city jails and the building that used to be the City Hall that was then used as a rehab center but is now offices.

Connectivity is here.

Here, everyone has cellphones. You buy a "load" to text for as little as 50 cents. Even my maid has a cellphone and posts videos on Facebook.

E commerce as in AliBaba and it's Philippine equivalents, e.g. Lazada and others,  is here too.

AliBaba is the Chinese equivalent of Amazon that showed how e-commerce can mean even isolated villages can get stuff through the delivery companies/courier companies. LINK.

in the last few years, we are using these companies to send rice samples and papers for our business, but so far we are too large to send rice via courier, but so small that we have to do rice deliveries by our own pickup trucks and once in awhile our large truck that we mainly use to haul rice and equipment for the farm.

But I suspect in the future we will be doing more rice transport to individual customers by courier type services to their homes.

It is now easy to get equipment and "stuff" in our town, whereas when I moved here 15 years ago, we had to go to Manila for a lot of basic needs (e.g. decent clothing, computer equipment).
but now we can get it locally. But with prosperity comes traffic jams, which now extend out of the city and suburbs and into the farm area small towns, and even with the new trains and overhead roads the traffic on the way to Manila is terrible.

 e commerce and e money on your cellphone is big in Manila, here in the provinces it is mainly by the middle class and young but now we have local malls being built, and like the USA, will probably have some of them go bankrupt as e commerce fills the gap to buy "stuff".

So e commerce goes along with credit cards, cellphones, and electronic IDs.

So should one worry? Depends on if you fear your government.

Digital ID website writes:

Key Findings Digital ID can empower marginalized people while also increasing surveillance of those same populations.

Gaining a legal identity can empower people in a variety of ways, but the collection of a lot of personal data about a large group can also act as a surveillance mechanism. ...ignoring the infrastructure and mass data gathering behind these systems, or the personal nature of the data gathered, could put already vulnerable populations at risk of harm.

Efforts aimed at providing legal identities are increasing in scope. One of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is for everyone to have a legal identity by 2030 (Target 16.9).

why? Why do UN bureaucrats think everyone needs to be on a database? Are they influenced by big business that has to make it safe to pay for "stuff"?

However, the way ‘legal identities’ are being provided is becoming increasingly broader. More data is being collected–and more systems are being integrated–in an attempt to meet a greater variety of purposes. This broadening of the initial focus leaves people unsure of the true purpose of the digital IDs they obtain.

pdf summary here.

India is already busy pushing emoney:





So the modern world is making it harder to stay off the web, even if you live in a small isolated third world village.

And since theives will quickly figure how to hack these things, presumably the next step if the "mark of the beast": using biometrics or using a chip in your hand.

So should one fear if the government knows a lot of personal stuff about you? Maybe.

this is not quite paranoid: as Digital ID points out, the Rohingya didn't want their ethnicity on their id cards for fear of ethnic cleansing.

China, back in 2018, made a biometric database of their Uighur population: including of those who immigrated to other countries. And of course, this made it easy for them to find people who were high risk and needed to go to reeducation camps.

Today, government surveillance of Uighurs permeates almost every aspect of the minority citizens' lives: They are subject to extensive security checks in public areas, from gas stations to shopping centers. Authorities rely on a network of 40,000 facial-recognition cameras to monitor Uighurs' activity, and recently began collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types from all Xinjiang residents between 12 and 65 years old.Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been forced into "re-education centers," which are essentially camps aimed at "rewiring the political thinking of detainees, erasing their Islamic beliefs and reshaping their very identities," according to the Associated Press.

This has been done before, of course, in Nazi Germany and in communist countries, but now it is easier to do, and "safe" places outside of surveillance is harder to find.

The bad news is that all of this relies on a delicate system that is vulnerable to acts of war or terrorism, or just plain everyday disasters.

All it would take is an earthquake (one earthquake south of Taiwan ten years ago cut a major cable in 2010, and we were off line and then slow for months),

and of course, local problems can be caused by ordinary disasters such as typhoons, floods, or volcanoes: A couple years ago, we lost internet and electricity for ten days did after a large typhoon with flood a few years ago. Luckily our cellphones still worked, and within a day, local entrepreneurs put out signs: Cellphone recharge here.

And then there is the problem if there is a repeat of the Carrington Event.





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update: BBC on the cashless society notes:

Americans used cash for an estimated 26% of transactions last year, down from 40% in 2012, according to surveys by the US central bank. The decline is not unique to the US. In the UK, the proportion of cash payments has dropped by more than half since 2008, sinking from 60% to 28% in 2018. In Sweden, cash accounts for just 6% of transactions, down from more than 35% in 2012.

the article discusses the problem: the poor in the USA often don't have bank accounts and use cash, so if a business/restaurant doesn't take cash, they can't use the business (i.e. stealth discrimination). So NYCity has just passed a law outlawing the denial of service to those who use cash.

... "It's clear that the future of currency is electronic," Leo Kremer, co-founder of Dos Toros, a cashless taqueria chain, told New York City Council last year. In his testimony, Mr Kremer said that he sympathised with the bill's intent, but it wasn't fair to hold restaurants to a different standard than the many businesses - such as e-commerce firms - for which electronic payments are the norm.

but the ACLU counters this:

Cash also works in an emergency when the power is out and preserves privacy in an era when credit card companies and others widely share shopper histories, said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has lobbied in favour of the new laws.

the article notes that changing to a cashless society makes a lot of money for these vendors:

Consulting firm McKinsey expects revenue in the global payments industry to grow 6% annually over the next five years, to more than $2.7 trillion.

which might be why the elites are pushing this.

(and I won't even get into hacking and fraud and snooping in on your purchases). 

 "Let's pull those members of our community forward into the modern financial system, rather than pulling the business community backward with a well-intentioned, but ill-advised and burdensome regulation," he said. Sarah Wafula, a project manager who works in Manhattan, says she hardly ever carries cash, since using cards makes it easier to track purchases. Many of her friends do the same. 

 but this article asks: What if your cards are stolen?