Personal Information

So, in my recent Facebook post I teased about a property tax story… here we go. Fred vs the Property Appraiser When Yeni and I started dating it was a long distance relationship. She came to the States and lived in Ann Arbor, working for the government on an H1 Visa— this means that if she left her job, she’d have to move back to her (at the time) country. In other words, she could not come live in Gainesville at the time. Well, as luck would have it, we started dating around the 2008 housing crisis. I tried putting the house up for sale, and after 1 year of no offers, watched my home value drop monthly. Good times. ...

[][1]Tell me about you. On a recent trip to Target, I decided to add some compressed air to my cart. Working in electronics, I find compressed air to be almost a necessity. The servers, computers, switches, and other equipment I use routinely need a good “spritz” of compressed air to keep the dust from accumulating. But I digress. When I went to check out, my cashier advised that I needed to scan my ID to purchase the compressed air. Not just show her my ID, but rather have my driver’s license scanned into their register. This of course allows Target to scan, read, and store my personally identifiable information. Although just someone’s full name fulfills the criteria of personally identifiable information, a Driver’s License barcode and/or magnetic stripe contains much more. By scanning the driver’s license, Target retains my full name, date of birth, address, gender, race, driver’s license number, license information (restrictions, endorsements), organ donation, and issue date. First, let’s look at the obvious… ...