My wife bought some wine tonight and the clerk scanned her driver’s license, creating a record. This seems intrusive. It also seems new here in Virginia; it didn’t happen when buying alcohol for our New Year’s party two weeks ago.
A cursory Googling shows it’s happened for cigarette purchases too in California, at least…maybe other places; I didn’t try to make a comprehensive list.
Is this legal? Is it a good idea?
Wal-Mart does it for liquor purchases here in Arizona. I’m 53, well above legal purchasing age for liquor, but as long as they do it for everybody, I’m fine with it. I don’t consider it an invasion of my privacy, any more than I consider it an invasion of privacy to scan my debit card to pay for it.
It’s becoming common where D.L. can be scanned, even if it’s not required by law.
Maybe it leaves a record that a DL was checked for an alcohol purchase.
If you actually have reason to doubt that it’s legal, you should contact the police and create a report. Nobody can speak with 100% certainty to what is or isn’t legal in your particular jurisdiction. But my gut hunch is that if it was illegal, a retailer wouldn’t be doing it.
What evidence do you have that anyone is creating a record of the purchase? It’s possible they are just scanning it to make sure the id is not a fake, and it’s also possible that the maker of that store’s policy has a policy not to sell to, say, illegal immigrants (who would either have no license, or a fake license). Just because your wife’s information was checked against her physical identity doesn’t mean the purchase information is uploaded anywhere.
Anecdotally, I have only ever had my license scanned once in my life. It was at a liquor store in a college town in Indiana, where a lot of people used fake IDs. I didn’t even think that they might be storing my purchase information. I figured it was just to make sure I really was who the license said I was.
Regardless of the store’s reasoning for the scan, if you don’t like the policy you can and should call around to various liquor stores in your area to see if this is a universal policy, or just at that store. However, I recommend ASKING them about it, instead of assuming that your liquor purchase is worthy of recording in a sea of the millions of liquor purchases in your state alone.
Target does it when you purchase M rated games (and I’m assuming R rated movies). It isn’t a local law, just store policy. They told me they “have” to do it with everyone.
Here in PA (where all liquor stores are state-run for now) they swipe your licence, and the register prints out a slip with your name/DOB/DL# that you have to sign verifying your age. They keep the slip. Oddly the liquor stores seem really casual about actually carding people. I’m 25 and usually don’t get carded at the state store, but am always carded buying beer at the supermarket (yes, that’s legalish in PA now), or at bars. I was actually kind of pissed when I made my first trip to the state store on my 21st birthday and they didn’t card me. I’d always been afraid to go there with my fake ID since I figured “It’s the Liquor Control Board, of course I’d get caught”. Then again it’s not like the LCB can fine itself. :rolleyes:
Like alphaboi, I’m rarely carded. I also tend to be chatty with the male cashiers, which no doubt helps. But in PA, the 3rd degree you get buying booze is absurd.
OP, it’s an invasion of privacy that is no doubt been made “legal” recently. I’m sorry you have to experience it.
Showing your license to prove your age is one thing, but having them scan it to make a permanent record of who bought what is something a little different. Your bank will keep a record that you paid for something at Wal-Mart but not what you bought. There was a big flap about privacy of what you buy/rent following the leak of the video rental records of Robert Bork.
If the store keeps such records then they would be subject to unauthorized leaks, or to subpoena.
I’ve been to bars that do it too, they have a camera that they put your id under and snap a digital pic of it before you can come in. I asked the door guy what that was all about and it’s due to fights and needing to call the cops on a regular basis and that way they can ID who it was easier.
They don’t scan your license here in Indiana for booze, but they certainly keep a record of your license number when you purchase pseudoephedrine. It’s because the amount of pseudoephedrine you can buy in a day or 90 days (there are rules for both time periods) is limited by law, and that’s how they track it.
I’m not happy about it, but then, locally, we’ve had fewer exploding hotel rooms, mobile homes, and cars since the law was passed so I’m thinking maybe it was a reasonable trade.
The police seem to be a pretty questionable source for what’s actually illegal. I’ve been illegally ticketed by the police when parked on my own property (they said they’d void the ticket after I brought it to their attention) and they’ve told protesters it’s illegal to assemble in public to petition for redress of grievances, then backed down when confronted (it’s a constitutional right, of course). I’m getting to the point where nameless individuals on a message board seem at least as reliable a source of information as local police.
You’d think so, but repeated efforts to get retailers to stop requiring a credit card to use a check failed, even though that was illegal in this area, until a few members of Congress ran afoul of it and got angry.
I find it implausible that anyone would scan something and NOT create a record; that’s what scanners are for. This wasn’t some science-fiction technology that beeps if the document is fake; this was a simple imaging device that creates a computer file of what it sees. The only purpose of making such a file is to store it; the clerk can’t read ones and zeroes with his mind.
As far as scanning it to make sure illegal immigrants aren’t buying alcohol (is that sort of discrimination even legal?), they could just LOOK at a license like everybody used to do. Since the scanner can’t tell fake.
I’m not really paranoid about this. I just found that the unannounced change in policy seemed odd, and the idea of permanent records of photo ID retained by grocery store employees seemed likely to result in trouble. At my workplace, any record with a driver’s license number, age, birthdate, height, weight, social security number, and other such identifiers is treated as Personally Identifiable Information and there are strict rules for who handles it, how it must be protected, and when it can be collected, if at all. This is because of the scores of incidents in which personal info of tens of thousands of people got stolen by or sold to malefactors, or accidentally published. Procedures to protect this kind of info are tightening up in most places, but not where one buys alcohol in Virginia, it appears.
In this case the purchase was wine. If the policy applies to hard liquor, there’s another consideration – the governor is trying to privatize state-controlled liquor sales, and although that might not happen, if it did, state databases might be sold to private enterprise.
I don’t see how scanning your license is necessary or even useful to make sure you are who the license says you are. Scanning the license, as opposed to simply checking it, does not add any value verification-wise, so the scan is not necessary. And a fake ID, or an ID belonging to someone else than the guy using it, does not become genuine by scanning it, so the scan is not useful either if the purpose of this is simply to verify your identity.
Of course it could be that the store doesn’t trust its own employees to conduct ID checks reliably - maybe the shopkeeper things that if he instructs his staff to scan licenses, chances are better that they actually look at it than they would be if the instruction were simply to check it. But then again, the scan as such would be immaterial, what matters would simply be that the license is handled a bit more thoroughly than just a very cursory glance.
The store registers arent ‘online’ to anybody other than perhaps their home offices. They simply verify that the ID is genuine and that the person is of age.
It doesnt guarantee that the actual owner of the ID is the person standing in front of them, however.
It is the law to check the ages of persons buying certain items and register scanning is a simple way of doing it. The clerk doesn’t have to do any math or become an expert in identifying fake ID’s, which leads to a lower incidence of clerk arrests for selling to a minor.
After working in retail for 12 years, I was very fortunate to have never been arrested for selling to a minor but several of my coworkers were. I sure wish we had scanners then!
Not all stores have the capability to scan. If you are uncomfortable, use a store that doesn’t do it.
Liquor stores in VA are state run. If the ABC’s are doing it, it’s a state requirement. Beer and wine can be bought anywhere, it’s not clear what or where they were buying.
It is legal for a store to require your ID. Many clubs and stores throughout the US have moved to ID scanners to verify what you are showing them is genuine. That doesn’t mean they are scanning it into a record. Many of them are just checking the machine has no storage capacity.
They may very well be keeping records and if you have issues with that not going there is certainly an option. The right to privacy from retailers is an ongoing and losing battle. You can contact a privacy rights organization to find out what they have to say on the legality of keeping those records.
At the same time almost any store in the US has a camera recording your purchase as well. As it’s just film, connecting the purchase and who you actually are isn’t nearly invasive as your license info, the capacity to find records of your purchases is already there, but at least you have the safety of anyone interested having to work to make the connections protecting your privacy.
With imaging and data base technology improving they won’t even need to check your ID, they’ll know who you are when you walk through the front door. Privacy is a thing of the past.
I’m willing to bet a scanner that can ID the security details of licenses from all 50 states is a lot better at picking out fake ID’s then your average minimum wage employee. It probably isn’t useful for picking out people using legal ID that isn’t theirs but for picking out actual fakes it is very useful.
I don’t care what they do with my driver’s license data. It shows (a) where I live, (b) that I am licensed to drive, (c) and that I am old enough to buy liquor. I don’t see how their knowing that affects me adversely in any way. I buy a 12 pack of beer once in awhile, only drink one or two bottles at a time and stay at home when I drink. Big whoop.
You want me to show you my D.L. to prove it’s me? Fine, take a look. It’s me.
You want me to hand my D.L. to you so you scan scan it and glean all sorts of details that are irrelevant to establishing my age in order to make a purchase just so you can collect the data, and possibly sell it to others? Forget it. If state DMV officials cannot release my D.L. information under law without my permission, I’m certainly not going to give you my permission for your marketing purposes.
LOT of unjustified paranoia up in here.
The scanner can tell the DOB, name, and address that are encoded within the barcode on the license. And the clerk can verify that this actually matches the printed information on the front. One method of making a fake ID that seems “more real” is to copy the barcode information from a real license and duplicate it on a bunch of fakes, while changing the name/address/DOB on the front to match what the customer wants on there as their (fake) personal information. So yes, you can spot a fake ID using this technology. We can’t tell you if the store in question was 100% doing this for sure, though. Why don’t you ask them?
As I said above, the scanner CAN tell fake–if the barcoded information doesn’t match the printed information on the front.
Moreover, shopkeepers are not legally required to sell anything to anybody. If a potential buyer, even someone who is clearly over the age of 21, can’t produce a state driver’s license or state ID for a liquor purchase, there is no legal requirement to sell to them. I’m not sure why you think it’s a right to purchase liquor in America; I assure you, it is not.
That would be quite a dumb forger who’d fake an ID that way - copying a barcode from person A’s card and putting it on a license that has person B’s (or a made-up person B’s) details on it. I think it’s not far-fetched to assume that if somebody has the technology to make an ID that, on surface, looks like a real one, that this somebody will also have access to software allowing him to create a barcode encoding anything he wants it to encode. That software is available out there, and your ID scan would fail at detecting this.