http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/technology/biometric-data-gathering-sets-off-a-privacy-debate.html?hpw&_r=0
Natasha Singer, the author of "When a Palm Reader Knows More than Your Life Line," discusses a very interesting topic. The author starts out by sharing one of his personal experiences in a hospital in New York where she was asked to put her hand in a palm scanner so that they could gather data from her veins and then create a patient identification profile which would help against identification theft and eventually make medical care much more efficient. The author retells this experience as if sharing a simple story of someone who went to the hospital and was hesitant and reluctant to expose her privacy so deeply. In general, the author talks about how there are so many "conveniences" which require people's identity and privacy to be exposed and may seem to be convenient but are actually pretty harmful.
The author uses several strategies to achieve her purpose of informing and persuading the reader to rethink about how they are exposing their privacy. The author starts with first person personal experience to retell her story in a hospital; she was reluctant to scan her palm for patient identification. She then proceeds to talk about Facebook and how some apps use face recognition for sharing photos and tagging photos. She also mentions Apple's Siri, and how it uses voice recognition and how many schools in the United States are using palm recognition for E-Z pass; in other words, biometric data is being used extensively but consumers pay that with their own privacy. The author takes a critical stance on the idea of privacy being lost because of apparent "convenience."
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