I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age.

I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.

They are scanning the PDF 417 barcode on the back.

Here are the specs for what appears on the driving license/ID and how to read the barcode:

https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/99ac7057-0f4d-4461-b0a2-3a553...

They issue a new spec every 4 years.

Thank you!

After a while you age out of getting carded. The vast majority of alcohol is bought without ever showing any ID.

I aged out of getting carded a long time ago, but I'm seeing stores where their policy is to card everyone. I was behind an old man with white hair and a cane who was bewildered when he was carded.

Stores collect not required customer information often.

To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.

Anything under 4% should be sessionable IME.

Your point was what? No one should be allowed more privacy than you wanted?

My point was mostly a joke about drinking beer in response to the OP drinking beer.

But the underlying darkness is that if you're paying for things using a CC, you've already given up on your privacy, but it's implicitly lost, rather than explicitly.

Not anymore, at least. In these parts your alcohol purchases did require a paper trail once upon a time.