On 14/09/06, Vivek Rai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 2) a system used by government .. ie legally binding.. ( in future, maybe other services like credit rating agencies, organizations trying to verify your identiry?).. this is more formal.. its content are deemed to be reliable by everyone.. it could be used by police across the country to track criminals.. excelent idea. and with a lot of terrorist activity going on and people having feque identities with actually criminal records this will work good.
in this case, you may keep a read-only access to the publicly avaialable info.. maybe more access to some paid subscribers How do you define more access? I think such records should be read only to every one for that matter. (potential customers would be someone issuing a credit card, home loan, or a car loan to you and hence trying to do an identity check/credit or criminal history check on you) most common is issuing a sim card for a mobile phone. car lones, home lones, credit card etc, all right there is a big mass of people going for all this. but almost every one these days wants a mobile phone and this same identity check comes into question. this will indeed serve this particularly big market. unique id for a citizen? well.. we dont have any unique ID so far.. US has a social security #, UK has a national Insurance #... maybe this is the major benefit of having such a system in the first place - as it can be a single identity for people having (or not having) various diverse id's .. (passport#, DL#, voter id# (for 18+), PAN# (for the few tax payers)).. why not have some biometric ID to make it really foolproof.. yes, that will give a big boost to the system. if some thing good has to happen with our system, let it be a good start. u can confidently say that ram ral, s/o shyam lal, living in pin code 100 020 (and with the given biometric ID details) has id 100 and has no criminal records or bad credit history.. so it is safe to lend money to him.. whereas ram lal s/o manmohan singh has defaulted on that previous loan paid to him.. in fact his current address is tihar jail.. oh, in this case just pay a few thousand rs to the babu in the clearical department and see what and how you can do with this system? but, then you can only design a technical framework to hold this data, and access/amend it. implementation details such as who enters and keeps on updating data would depend on sarkari babus sitting in the villages who are normally happier to exploit and harass the citizens than in serving them. this can be seen in different perspective. while what I said above holds true, but we can look at the positive side of it. just remember the villages had one phone in the post offices and they exploited people who came to make an std call. they loved the system because people were at their feet. but one man called sam pitroda came and changed it all. today every village (well almost) has lot of phone connections. so what I want to say here is that just like bad things, if good things are pushed smartly and sharply with firm force, things can happen. signing off on that happy note. Krishnakant. -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
