At $5000, identity is the name of the game
By Michelle Grattan
March 20, 2004
How much can your "identity" be bought for? About $5000, it seems.
This is the price that NSW fraud squad police paid to get proof of identity, including forged copies of cards that most people would believe to be secure, according to outgoing Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton.
He said yesterday the police had bought the equivalent of 100 points - all you need, for instance, to open a bank account.
Mr Crompton said in Canberra that Australia needed to have a debate about how identity was established and the questions of privacy that went with that. He opposed an "Australia Card" - a proposal rejected in the 1980s - and warned of the dangers of a simple system such as one based on everybody having one number.
"If you put all your eggs in one basket, you allow them all to be cracked in one hit," he said.
A better alternative was a system that was simple to use but relied on many numbers.
One example would be to use generally a "biometric" approach, such as a scan of a person's iris, but have it connected to different numbers for different purposes.
theage.com.au
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