A Dangerous Card

The DC One Card is a digitally enhanced tracking card offered to the residents of Washington, D.C. I applied for it and got it in less than a week. Thinking nothing of it, I went to check on my email account. To my surprise, this card had tapped into my account. When you apply, you have to give an email address. I was mad because I didn’t know when I applied for it that this card would spy on me. The card functions as a joint library and Smarttrip card. It knows what books I check out of the library, if I’m late in returning them or not; it also knows which movies I check out. And it seems it can even read my email correspondence.
The card is dangerous! I feel it’s an invasion of privacy.
I found out about it by going to a job club meeting. I needed a Smarttrip card. One of the guys told me the city was giving out Smarttrip cards. The card also monitors your travel patterns. This is a thinking card. I was reading George Orwell’s “1984,” a fiction novel. Three lines come to mind:
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
The first line: War is peace.
I feel we are at war with technology. We love it, we embrace it, we can’t get enough of it. Once the power goes out, we are in trouble. The peace is for right now. We control the technology but for how long?
The second line: Freedom is slavery.
We are free for right now. But maybe someday soon we will entrap ourselves in slavery to technology. We must take safeguards to make sure it doesn’t happen.
The third line: Ignorance is strength.
I feel we are in many ways blind to technology. This is the ignorance part. The strength is believing as a people we can adapt and grow and hopefully change the new society.
If you would like to get more information on the DC One Card call 311 or go to www.dconecard.dc.gov.