How would you persuade people to get tested and to use this card?

Essentially, it is a little like when the telephone first came along. One telephone by itself is quite useless; two is very much better and so on. Eventually, it will seem very odd if someone who is young and single does not have a card.

I believe that there are a lot of people out there who do not want to get infected with anything regardless of the cost and inconvenience. These people are also the ones least likely to need these cards anyway - just like they would be the first to get vaccinated and be the least likely to need it. As soon as these people started using it and it became clear that their risks have been greatly reduced, others who are more careless would need to join up if they wanted to get the type of partners they aspire to having.

How would it actually work in practice?

Clearly, the data associated with a card, will be accessible by a number of different ways:

• Regular, or cell, phone. The 2 people would call a special phone number and type in their card numbers and PIN's and then listen to the information that would be automatically read out to them by machine (like the banks do) A cell phone could send an SMS message with card number and PIN and return the results to another cell phone as a call or as another SMS.
• The internet. The two people would use a browser and the same principles as inthe first example above would apply.

How can this card really be used effectively if two people just met but are both cardholders?

The way people will interact is the psychological side and I think it will proceed as follows:

• The card will be become a status symbol - like Nike shoes in the States or tribal markings in parts of Africa.
• A person having a card will be perceived as someone who is responsible and not a hypocrite or a secret infector of others. The fact that the card itself is not a health card or anything of the sort will not be understood properly initially.
• The card itself will be a topic of conversation to people who are only vaguely contemplating a sexual relationship - like cigarettes to smokers.
• That a person is a card-carrier will be signalled to others through logos and other fashion accessories. Thirty years ago, gays used different colored handkerchiefs and the positioning of their key-chains to signal their sexual preferences (some still do). A recent equivalent is the chalking of certain symbols on the sidewalk to indicate the presence of a WiFi station nearby

How is it impossible to find a person using the data available in the database?

Computers are really quite dumb. They cannot make connections if there are no links. If you have card number 4234 4686 1094 0098 and you have health status X, how can the dumb machine find out that you live in a town near San Paolo at a certain address and what your name is?

What can one do if one does not want the computer to keep one's personal data any longer?

Destroy your card and there is absolutely no way to link you to the data in the computer.

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