BY PNW STAFF
What was intended as a grab for attention may have much deeper ramifications after a student in Italy went viral on Tiktok for tattooing the barcode of his covid certificate on his arm.
Twenty-two year old Andrea Colonnetta's left arm now bears a matrix of black squares from the QR code of his official Italian green pass.
He said he had received both doses of a coronavirus vaccine.
The pass gives proof of coronavirus status -- that you are vaccinated, have recovered from the virus, or tested negative in the last 48 hours.
It has been required in Italy since August 6 to get into cinemas, museums and indoor sports venues or to eat indoors at restaurants.
The barcode tattoo has apparently become much more than just a novelty as it actually works for scanning. Colonnetta was able to show a video of himself entering a McDonalds after a security guard scanned his tattoo.
Many people are greatly concerned about how the future of covid passports will affect their freedoms and even the technological aspects of how such passports might be enforced in the future. There is already a very large black market for fake covid certificates and some believe the only way to crack down on such forgeries will be biometric enforcement which leads to the necessity of biometric surveillance.
The recent fall of Afghanistan is a lesson in what happens when the bad guys get access to biometric databases.
After years of a push to digitize databases in the country, and introduce digital identity cards and biometrics for voting, activists warn these technologies will now be used by the Taliban to track down people who worked with the previous government or Americans by checking their fingerprints or iris scans against a database.
There are already several reports from Afghanistan that the Taliban have been using biometric readers when going from house to house for security checks.
With access to such data, it will be much more difficult to hide one's identity as well as that of your family's identities, and the data can also be used to flesh out your contacts and network," said Welton Chang, chief technology officer at Human Rights First.
It could also be used "to create a new class structure - job applicants would have their bio-data compared to the database, and jobs could be denied on the basis of having connections to the former government or security forces.
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