Privacy concerns rise with legal pot sales
Today is Green Tuesday, the day the first pot shops open in Massachusetts. There are going to be plenty of challenges today, including long lines and procedural and process issues.
Most immediately concerning, though, is that customers will be prompted to show government IDs, which will subsequently be scanned by a machine. That has privacy experts concerned about private information being exposed.
“The key question a privacyconscious customer needs to ask is whether these systems keep records — for instance to enforce individual dispensing limits — and how often they’re purged,” R. David Edelman, a cybersecurity researcher at MIT, told the Herald’s Kathleen McKiernan.
“The makers of ID-verification systems will want to implement new features, and those features often require keeping data in order to analyze it. The odds are many do maintain some form of records, and if you’re concerned about keeping your habits private, these systems create some risk. With digital records, the default is often indefinite retention, and the potential for exposure is real,” he said.
One concern is that federal officials could seek records from individual dispensaries. Amanda Rositano, director of compliance for New England Treatment Access LLC in Northampton, insists there is no risk to customer information and that NETA uses a scanner similar to those used at clubs and bars to make sure the IDs are real.
“Once it scans the next ID, that information has been deleted,” Rositano told the Herald. “It is top-of-the-line technology. We don’t maintain information from our adult-use clients.”
Only time will tell. The pro-pot lobby fought hard for this day.
Jim Borghesani, a spokesman for the Yes on 4 campaign that legalized pot sales, said, “We can rightfully squawk about state delays and problematic local opposition, but the fact remains that we’re the first state east of the Mississippi to offer legal, tested cannabis to adult consumers in safe retail settings. This is a historic distinction for Massachusetts. Now we’re going to be at the forefront of the drive toward replacing lingering reefer-madness fears with a rational approach that benefits consumers and communities.”
We are more concerned with Massachusetts madness than reefer madness. The nascent industry will require smart, expedient regulation and not a bureaucratic morass in which accountability is nothing more than a pithy press release or a concert of finger-pointing.