Assumptions of identity
I have a confession to make. I stole someone’s identity earlier this evening. More exactly, I borrowed it without her knowledge and then gave it back when I was done. About a year ago I found a small part of someone’s electronic identity much like you’d find a penny on the ground. And just as the loss of a penny causes no significant damage to the looser and accrues such little gain to the finder, such a small thing was stuck in my pocket without thought, mingled with my other possessions, and used without remorse, or even thought. The details of the misrepresentation are so pedestrian that it is tempting to quickly brush them off, but I actually thought about what I was doing on an abstract level for the first time this evening and it raised a host of issues.
About a year ago the magnetic stripe on my store loyalty card for a grocery chain I frequent stopped working. I quickly tired of handing the card to the clerk to type in the card number and decided to give a shot at typing in my phone number to the keypad myself. I knew that I had gotten the card when I lived at a previous residence and had a different phone number so I took a try at reproducing the murkily remembered digits and failed. I thought that maybe I might have associated the card with my current home phone number at some point and gave it a try. It worked. I got the discounts on the things that were on sale for loyalty card holders only. I didn’t recognize my usurpation of another’s identity until the checkout clerk read my name from the computer and thanked me by name as always, but not by my name. I keep meaning to fill out the form to get a new card, but somehow I only ever think to do it immediately after checking out and that is a time when I am already sick of the store and just want to go home.
So what’s the big deal? I’m not harming the other party. At most the only effect on Monica is that she might get a few more register receipts for processed cheese products and luncheon meats than usual. However taking a careful look at this situation has lead to some interesting thoughts.
Firstly, someone is in fact harmed. The grocery chain. In being granted a club card the shopper is explicitly giving the grocery chain the right to track their purchases in return for access to discounted merchandise. My first analysis was that if the information had no monetary value to them then they would not give me something of monetary value in return for it. But in reality, they are holding hostage the discounts that they used to give out in order to get my custom. The only way that I can get those discounts is to give them something that costs me nothing so I am unlikely to switch stores over the issue since they already know how much they can charge me for stuff without me leaving. Consideration of this transaction of two monetarily valueless items that do have a monetary value to the receiving party and non-monetary cost to the giving party leads me to the conclusion that the one sided nature of the information about this transaction renders it inherently unfair. I have always been slightly uneasy with the exchange, and so cheating them by obfuscating my shopping record with someone else’s felt right.
The other big thoughts coming out of this for me resolve around identification. My home phone number has a better chance of identifying me specifically than my name, but it still ended up connecting me to someone else’s data. Ten years ago my name lead the city collections office to try to collect a $659 fine from me because someone with the same name as me had committed a crime. A few weeks ago the red box DVD rental kiosks started sending me check out and return notices for someone with my same name in Utah who has an email address that differs from mine by only a single period. They must index their database by name and send email notices to the oldest instance of that name. Good thing that their billing process associates the credit card info with the rental event rather than with the customer name.
The simple mutability of my identity by random chance causes me to ponder the absurd question of how to decrease the value of being me.
