World View | The Mark of the Beast Is Located in Aisle Six, Adjacent to Frozen Foods

CISO Paul Raines ponders biometrics, religion and privacy in a Dutch grocery store

Even if Albert Heijn is sincere and diligent in protecting the information and are sharing your fingerprint with no one else, there are still no guarantees. Suppose their database got hacked? Or suppose they were like the U.S. telecommunications companies who, when asked (coerced?) by the government, acquiesced in illegally spying on Americans? That happened and it's likely that those companies will face no legal action from having done so. If it happened with telecommunications companies and phone lines it could just as easily happen with grocery store chains and fingerprint scans.

These two groups, the religious fundamentalists and the privacy advocates, make unlikely political bedfellows. Yet, as the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So, they may yet make common cause against this system.

The Netherlands has a strong privacy advocate group and there is the Data Protection Act which governs how corporations use private citizen data. There is also a Bible Belt in the Netherlands, although the Christian population in the Netherlands is considerably smaller as a percentage of the overall population, has less influence in politics, and is less fundamentalist in nature than are their American counterparts.

The program is currently in a pilot phase and will stay that way for six months. After that time it will be evaluated and, if successful, it will be deployed on a nationwide basis. Who knows? If it succeeds in grocery stores, it may be introduced to other vertical markets. If it succeeds in The Netherlands, it may be introduced in other countries.

This new payment system may be quietly flying under the radar screen for now because it is only being deployed in one grocery store. However, if and when it goes national it will attract everyone's attention—including the two aforementioned groups. When that happens Albert Heijn had better be ready for the questions and the hostility that will inevitably follow. ##

Paul Raines is CISO at a nonprofit organization in the Netherlands.