Artificial Cheese

For those of you who follow this blog religiously, you may remember an old entry of mine that dealt with the ugly redundency involved with filing paperwork.  It focused on the repetitive time-wasting nature of entering your personal information on every form just because it was going to different people.

You also may remember that I wrote my local congress-person, Representative Patrick Murphy, an email where I asserted my views on the subject and demanded that the government play a role in creating a common form that all packages will “extend”.

Well he actually responded!  He’s a real person!  Here it is…

Dear Dev,

Thank you for your comments and suggestions that the federal government provide standards for data entry forms so that software could automatically enter standard personal data on each form.

There are two commercial efforts that my staff is aware of to provide automatic data entry on forms. One of these is the Microsoft “Passport” system, which seems to have foundered amid concerns of privacy, monopoly, and identity theft. A second is the Google “auto-complete” feature, which does a reasonable job of filling out standard information in Web forms but suffers from similar concerns of privacy and security.

In the discussion of illegal immigration it has become common to discuss the possibility of a national electronically-readable worker ID card with biometric and other information encoded into it. Although I am not necessarily in favor of such an idea, it has been pointed out that this would also provide a very good “security dongle” that would prevent most kinds of computer identity theft. If this system were ever implemented, querying the data in this card would also provide a simple computer-automated method of data entry for forms such as you describe.

Thank you for contacting me. I value such correspondence and take seriously the concerns of my constituents. To stay informed of my work, or to sign up for my electronic newsletters, please visit my Web site at www.house.gov/patrickmurphy. Also, please do not hesitate to contact me again if I can help in any way.

Alright, so he didn’t exactly “get it”.  That’s okay!  It wasn’t a real hot-button issue anyway, but I’ll give him a verbal “Pat”-on-the-back.