Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted • Hacker News Board

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#131

Post by foerbert » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

tomtimtall wrote: post #100

motohagiography wrote: post #24

Good. Religious exemptions are pragmatic canaries for state overreach. People are not livestock, even if states and employers like to treat them that way. The idea of a religious exemption isn't just some pastafarian variation, it represents a very real line between the individual and group and whether one is a citizen or mere property. This is the marking issue with biometrics. Are you a being with agency, or are yo…

> The point of privacy laws are that your consent is required, and taking things from you under duress or coercion is not consent. This seems like your taking it a bit to the extreme. We both agree that for me to hire you to do a job I’m allowed to know who you are right? And that to identify the one person out of the world population I am allowed to keep a record with enough details that I can identify if a person i…

This, alone, is not the full picture. It's trivially easy to get into utter absurdity. What if an employer decides they can only identify people by surgically grafting special ID cards to their foreheads?

There is - obviously - more at play here than simply the right of the employer to identify employees by any means they wish. There is some level of reasonableness here as well.

This moves the argument into murkier grounds, as now we have to figure out how reasonable fingerprints are in any given situation.

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#132

Post by amateurICEguy » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

sigzero wrote: post #107

keithnz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I'm confused what belief is held such that you can't be fingerprinted. My initial searching for what that might be is mostly "Mark of the Beast". Which seems odd.

Fingerprinting could not in any way be interpreted as the "mark of the beast" because there is no mark put on the person during fingerprinting. So that wouldn't stand any scrutiny. Religious or otherwise.

You have to be careful when you interpret a religious passage.

For starters you don't (do you?) speak the original language, so you're at the mercy of the translator for the term "mark"

But, going more meta, most religious traditions don't have a strict textual interpretation of their texts. Certainly the author could not have known fingerprinting techniques 2000 years ago. It is not unreasonable to interpret "mark" to be an identifier.

Of course then the "fingerprint" mark would have to be compatible with the rest of Revelations.

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#133

Post by adrianba » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

User23 wrote: post #119

adrianba wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's that bad. It's still the law in the United States that you cannot claim a religious exemption to a (state) law of general applicability. If the law applies to everyone regardless of religion and was not intended to impact a particular religious practice, then you cannot challenge it you because you claim that it affects your right to exercise your religion. See City of Boerne v. Flores, which affirm…

Would a state law banning infant male circumcision as genital mutilation without consent stand? How about a state law against branding or tattooing infants or any other irreversible body modification? Clearly these are both rhetorical questions with obvious answers. Whether or not those obvious answers are morally correct is another matter.

I'm not sure what point you are making here. Presumably your obvious answer is "yes"? For example, there are indeed some states that outlaw tattooing minors (although many states do permit it with parental consent).

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#134

Post by ethbr0 » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #108

akerl_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's to stop them saying "You now need to accept getting paid half of what we'd agreed to when you were employed"? In most of the US, for most US jobs, absolutely nothing. The vast majority of US workers are at-will employees. Their boss can call them up at any point and say “We’ve decided that starting next pay period, we’ll be cutting your salary in half. Have a great day!” The employee’s options are to accept…

Yeah - I've never quite understood that "at will" employment status you have over there. Here in Australia, we're a fair bit more heavily unionised than you are over there, which helps keep some of the power imbalance in the employers favour in check. Not that unionisation is perfect though either. When I was growing up it was a regular thing for unions to wield their collective power in aggressively overreaching way…

The point of at will employment is that there's supposed to be a free labor market. In that employers are free to act as they desire (hire and fire) and employees are free to act as they desire (hired and quit).

The reaction to a bad job is... you quit and find another one.

Granted, there are substantial power balances between the parties, which is why even the US adds some federal protections (can't fire or decide not to hire for certain protected reasons, wage and work hour limitations) and states can add more (most relevant to HN, California's ignoring non-compete agreements).

But this particular example just smacks of entitlement, when the government worker protection departments should probably be spending more time on chicken processing factories running 18 hour shifts around band saws and paying minimum wage.

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#135

Post by dane-pgp » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #70

dabinat wrote: post #25

Interesting that he was religiously opposed to fingerprinting but had no problem with the debt collection aspect. I seem to recall Jesus being not-too-complimentary about the tax collectors of the time who hounded people for money.

There's a lot of things that people who never read the bible will never find out about. Numbers 31 > Now kill all the boys. > And kill every woman who has slept with a man, > but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

You say that people who never read the Bible will never find out about Numbers 31, yet here you are telling many people who never read the Bible about Numbers 31. I almost wonder if the average atheist is more likely to be aware of this Biblical narrative than the average Christian, but I'm not sure what that would prove if true.

Anyway, it's worth linking to the Wikipedia article which provides the background to that chapter[0] and pointing out that at the time of the events described in Numbers 31, it was the standard practice of nations to commit cultural genocide against their enemies (to prevent a continuing cycle of violence), by killing off their males and their widows, leaving only the unmarried to assimilate into the victorious society.

Less violently, it was common for men to defect to a foreign culture when taking a wife from that culture, which had been the case with Israelite men and Midianite women. It was that potential for cultural extinction (and literal extinction, as a deadly plague struck the Israelites after this) which lead to the war whose rules of engagement you quoted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_31#Background

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#136

Post by throwawaylinux » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

Lammy wrote: post #124

throwawaylinux wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an argument.

Anything I don't like is an invalid argument "The present-day concept of the relatively longer 'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early 19th century and was originally a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2 pm on the basis that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning."

Your post did not even attempt to address anything I wrote. It was not an argument. Hoping I'm not fond of weekends is not an argument.

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#137

Post by yumraj » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

The article does not say whether the person has a driving license or another form of ID that requires fingerprinting.

Note, I’m not saying that an employer should be allowed to fingerprint, which they should not. I’m simply pointing to the absurdity of the religious exemption as I’m pretty sure no religion says that a person cannot be fingerprinted.

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#138

Post by seattle_spring » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

williamtrask wrote: post #51

throwawaylinux wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religious exemptions shouldn't be a thing though. I should not get more protections or rights in any way than another citizen because I happen to have or claim different beliefs than them. I'm not talking about being discriminated against because of religious beliefs, mind you. I'm talking about the right to do or refuse something (e.g., refuse a fingerprint or, or refuse to serve alcohol) and protection of those cho…

Think of a religion more like a union

Corrupt and thoroughly outdated?

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#139

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #44

motohagiography wrote: post #24

Good. Religious exemptions are pragmatic canaries for state overreach. People are not livestock, even if states and employers like to treat them that way. The idea of a religious exemption isn't just some pastafarian variation, it represents a very real line between the individual and group and whether one is a citizen or mere property. This is the marking issue with biometrics. Are you a being with agency, or are yo…

Religious exemptions shouldn't be a thing though. I should not get more protections or rights in any way than another citizen because I happen to have or claim different beliefs than them. I'm not talking about being discriminated against because of religious beliefs, mind you. I'm talking about the right to do or refuse something (e.g., refuse a fingerprint or, or refuse to serve alcohol) and protection of those cho…

[deleted]

Re: Man wins $65K after being fired for refusing to be fingerprinted

#140

Post by dane-pgp » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 2:45 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

latenightcoding wrote: post #6

most of my family agreed to get fingerprinted to get free gym membership (family friend runs the gym and you scan your thumb at the door for access). It pissed me off so much.

Modern fingerprint reader systems don’t capture and store an entire fingerprint. They use algorithms that extract a number of features from the print. You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example. If you’re concerned about giving up identifiable data points, the photo on your gym membership account is more likely to be usa…

> You can’t extract someone’s fingerprint from a gym’s fingerprint scanning system and run it through a background check database, for example.

Reversing the algorithm in order to generate a plausible fingerprint from the features stored by the scanner seems much simpler than cracking a secure hash function, since the scanner algorithm has to deal with imprecise inputs.

Whether the generated fingerprint would match the relevant record in the background check database depends on whether the features extracted by the scanner are sufficiently different from those used by the background check system, and I suspect that companies just reuse the same algorithms for both.