Earlier today, I read this article... CLEAR for beer Techcrunch
It scares and excites me for so many reasons:
Imagine a cop pulls you over and instead of asking for your license and registration, he simply holds out a tiny scanner that scans your thumbprint or fingerprint in order to verify your identity, the expiration date on your license, and if your insurance is still valid.
Imagine being able to get your food stamps with just your thumbprint instead of an EBT card. You walk into a grocery store, load up your cart, and at the checkout lane, instead of swiping your card, you just put your thumb on the scanner and it instantly verifies your food stamp balance.
Imagine checking into a hotel with just your thumbprint. They verify the credit card attached to your CLEAR account and hand you the hotel key.
CLEAR will become the place where you store your physical identity. You won’t need to carry your credit card, debit card, license, social security card, state ID, or any other form of identification. Your fingerprint will become your identification. In this future, you will only need yourself and your phone.Imagine renting a car, buying chips at a casino, picking up a prescription at your local pharmacy. Basically anything that requires any kind of physical card or slip of paper could be disrupted with CLEAR.
Sounds insane, huh? Sounds kind of exciting too, right?
Now imagine that kind of power in the wrong hands.
Imagine what a government such as our current one would do with that kind of information. They'd create a national registry of every American.
Don’t get me wrong. CLEAR getting into beer is not a signal that they intend to do all that... well except for what the CEO said.
The future is exhilarating. But with great power comes great responsibility. I just hope CLEAR is up for the challenge.