(OPINION) PNW – What was intended as a grab for attention may have much deeper ramifications after a student in Italy went viral on Tiktok for tattooing the barcode of his covid certificate on his arm.

Twenty-two-year-old Andrea Colonnetta’s left arm now bears a matrix of black squares from the QR code of his official Italian green pass. He said he had received both doses of a coronavirus vaccine. The pass gives proof of coronavirus status — that you are vaccinated, have recovered from the virus, or tested negative in the last 48 hours.

It has been required in Italy since August 6 to get into cinemas, museums, and indoor sports venues or to eat indoors at restaurants. The barcode tattoo has apparently become much more than just a novelty as it actually works for scanning. Colonnetta was able to show a video of himself entering a Mcdonald’s after a security guard scanned his tattoo.

Many people are greatly concerned about how the future of covid passports will affect their freedoms and even the technological aspects of how such passports might be enforced in the future. There is already a very large black market for fake covid certificates and some believe the only way to crack down on such forgeries will be biometric enforcement which leads to the necessity of biometric surveillance.

The recent fall of Afghanistan is a lesson in what happens when the bad guys get access to biometric databases. After years of a push to digitize databases in the country, and introduce digital identity cards and biometrics for voting, activists warn these technologies will now be used by the Taliban to track down people who worked with the previous government or Americans by checking their fingerprints or iris scans against a database. READ MORE