A card to tell Leo they exist

WE all know that this whole technology thing isn’t going to end well. Though we can be a bit selective about it. So, for example, on one hand, people are a bit suspicious about the public services card, which they reckon is part of a conspiracy for the Government to know our names, our PPS numbers, and whether we are entitled to the free travel. And we worry the Government might share this information with itself.

What makes it feel more like a conspiracy is that it seems to have signed up three million people to its little racket without any kind of outcry until now. Very mysterious indeed. The Government might be claiming that these people were happy to sign up for their card, but we know the truth. They were all bullied into handing over their information and then clearly they were warned to say nothing about it afterwards.

And now the rest of us want to know things like what is the legal basis for this, and who exactly will be privy to this basic information about us. We are suddenly all experts on cybersecurity and identity theft, and we don’t trust the Government any more.

But for some weird reason we do trust social media. We put our PhDs in cybercrime aside when we tell them everything. Hands up who ever even read the privacy policy when signing up for anything on Google or Apple or anywhere else. And hands up who ever reads the updates they send now and then. Up it pops, to tell you they have changed their privacy policy. It could say that they are going to give your first born to the Martians for all we know. We just click ‘agree’ and on we go.

Most of us have phones that know more about us than we do at this stage. My iPhone certainly knows better than I do where I am and where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. It knows all my passwords, what my habits are and what I like to look at on the internet. Your Fitbit probably knows more about your future than you do. It knows better than you do when you’re going to die. But that’s OK. Because we can trust Google and Apple and all those guys. They have our best interests at heart. Unlike the Government, who is out to get us.

And it’s not as if we need Google or the Government to share too much information about us with everyone anyway. We do it ourselves on social media all the time.

When Leo Varadkar tweeted, on the day that two homeless people died, that he can still remember where he was when Diana died — “Hard to believe it’s 20 years” — he told us a whole lot more about himself than all his public utterances.

At a time like that, you have to think a card telling the Government that a person exists and that they have a name and that they are entitled to certain basic things is a good idea.