Security for the business parks and residential estates need to come up with another solution besides scanning your personal id card or driving license.
Living in South Africa you often have to access business parks or residential gated communities and the one thing they all do is scan your driving license/identity card plus scan the license disc on your windscreen. Once this information is gathered then you are free to access the premises. Not that long ago one would have had to sign a visitor registry book in order to gain entry.
This personal information data is obviously being stored somewhere and this is concerning knowing how important our personal data is to keep private. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) has raised issues after it has received many complaints recently. Some business parks even use facial recognition cameras over and above the scanning of personal information without your knowledge.
The problem is this will have to change as data protection is becoming more and more relevant in our society today. Having your personal identification records stored by an unknown security company does not exactly mean it is safe and these all have monetary value for data companies. What is stopping them form selling it on because you have freely handed it over when gaining access to the business park.
These types of online one stop shop quoting sites are making money not on just the commissions, but also the personal data you provide.
The amount of times we unwittingly hand over our personal information for example when we are seeking insurance quotes. We hand out our name, our address and personal identification every time we are looking for a quote whether we end up signing up or not. The companies that offer the 10 cheapest insurance quotes like we have HIPPO in South Africa are making commission off the insurance companies, but they are also gathering personal data in the process that is worth far more monetary value to data companies.
In the future all of this freely handing over our data has to stop and will be in breach of the personal privacy act. Then again it is probably already too late because many of us would already have our information on some database somewhere.
A quick google search reveals that your personal data with a photo and identification document or card is worth around $263 per year for these companies to use. I am sure if you are well off financially and are a target market for companies then that data is worth far more.
I have mentioned this previously that companies used to run competitions with what was deemed good prizes attracting loads of consumers who had no clue their information was being resold and paid for the entire competition. I sued to think this was down to the marketing costs and had no idea the company was actually making a profit from these competitions.
These days I try and avoid handing over any sort of personal information because you just know by doing so it will trigger spam calls that will be phoning for months on end. The last time I did this was at the local butchers who was giving away a car and now I just avoid these information grabbers. It always seems harmless yet we know what is happening behind the scenes as having a batch of 5000 consumers with all their personal information is a valuable commodity today.