The Payments World Really Wants To Know Who You Are (techcrunch.com) 73
jhigh writes: The generation that brought us the obsession with snapping photos of their faces, uploading to social media channels, and terming it "selfies" has unknowingly encouraged the launch a new cybersecurity platform for the world. You can sum it up thus: "pay with your face." Quoting: "Socure’s Social Biometrics Platform, which is already in use by financial institutions in more than 175 countries, provides analytics, assessing information about you from other public online sources, producing a social biometric profile, matching to your photo, and generating a score to determine the authenticity of your identity. ... Whether you have an established credit history or not, the one thing most of us have, especially millennials, is an online social platform presence. Biometrics data mining for payments security also reaches the unbanked crowd, those who have healthy online histories but might not necessarily use financial institutions or carry proper government-issued credentials." This is a fitting legacy for millennials, who impart knowledge one click at a time.
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At least your fingerprints remain the same throughout your life.
Yeah, tell that to anyone on my company's maintenance crew who each have at least five fingerprints scanned into their portable devices but still end up using the typed code at least twice a week. In the long run your finger prints remain similar enough, but if everyday injuries like a paper cut or a second degree burn are enough to void my transaction until they heal then this is a stupid idea.
chemo erasure (Score:2)
Bitcoin (Score:2)
Re:Bitcoin (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is no such thing as "anonymous"; there is merely a spectrum from known identiy to arbitrarily strong pseudonymity, and it is possible under Bitcoin to achieve arbitrarily strong pseudonymity.
Re:Bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "anonymous"; there is merely a spectrum from known identiy to arbitrarily strong pseudonymity, and it is possible under Bitcoin to achieve arbitrarily strong pseudonymity.
Somebody mark that insightful! This is something bitcoin enthusiasts somehow don't want to notice. Bitcoin is not an inherently anonymous currency! Every bitcoin transaction goes through the internets. Every single one. The "pseudonymous" assertion is "well, nobody would ever want to do all the datamining needed to backtrack the information and back out who bought what...."
Biometrics is just silly (Score:5, Interesting)
It has been shown again and again biometrics don't really work:
- they can't be precise, because humans aren't solid objects. So they have to have pretty large tolerances which makes it easier for them to be fooled
- the most used biometric systems start failing when people get above 65, so it's just pure age discrimination
- when someone has a made a good enough copy of your biometric characteristics you can't easily replace your own
Why do people, or should I say companies and governments, keep trying to use it ?
Re:Biometrics is just silly (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the alternatives also have tolerances and can be defeated, and after risk managing it, it's cheaper
In the short term... (Score:1)
Or rather it will look cheaper in the next quarterly report, as they are rolled out however the economics of spoofing them shift in problematic ways, it is one thing to secure a toy from individual attackers quite another to secure a payment system form organised crime.
Any pas key easily readable from looking at a person can be copied in the same way, now you do not just have to worry about paying in a dodgy machine but also waking down the wrong street. Worse the cost limits on producing the readers mean t
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Any pas key easily readable from looking at a person can be copied in the same way, now you do not just have to worry about paying in a dodgy machine but also waking down the wrong street.
DNA shares the same problem. While DNA can go a long way toward identifying someone from the crowd (odds that are often greatly inflated), they tend to overlook the fact that it is incredibly easy to strew bits of someone else's DNA around.
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Why do people, or should I say companies and governments, keep trying to use it ?
Because companies and governments have a harder time tracking plain old cash, and we can't have that.
They practically come in their pants at the idea of being able to track and tie every transaction to an individual. It's their ultimate wet dream come true.
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Or stop a person from making transactions. What do you do if there is no cash anymore and your bank accounts just got frozen?
Exactly. What happens is you're screwed. It's the first (and possibly last) step to becoming an unperson or "undesirable". I doubt an underground economy or barter system would be a practical alternative (and that would likely be made illegal).
It would be so easy to control the population and I have no doubt that 99% of politicians would love this idea. No more pesky dissenters and no organized resistance. It would be a wet dream come true for them.
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After the Greece fiasco, cash is king.
Re:Biometrics is just silly (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people, or should I say companies and governments, keep trying to use it ?
Because this is the way actual human beings identify each other-- by looking at each other.
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Why do people, or should I say companies and governments, keep trying to use it ?
Because money can be made selling this stuff. What else is there?
Bizarre (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it truly bizarre that so many people get so whipped up about the possibility that the government might have a copy of their phone bill in a data warehouse somewhere (even if it isn't used) but then spam the internet with all sorts of personal information.
Future oppression in much of the world is likely to be built on top of tools and products that today are being provided for our "convenience."
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>Whether you have an established credit history or not, the one thing most of us have, especially millennials, is an online social platform presence.
>online social platform presence
'87 kid, even during myspace I responded to friends asking me to up their Friend Score "I don't do that. WHY would you do that to yourself?" without an answer. I've since concluded everyone is suppressing ego, narcissism, and the endless social hunger for imitation popularity, aka "need to belong". Today I will concede that "login with your facebook" might save me five seconds, but that cost is dwarfed by the unseen effect ten times over. I concede that not curating a twatter/linkedin costs me notoriety I d
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And I find it this funny "carry proper government-issued credentials". As soon as it starts it will either be cracked by a secret police agency or the service will be classified as a bank so that identification is required due to anti-terrorism laws. How naive are people? And as bad as governments are corporations can even be worse, creatively 'borrowing' your face to opt you in for services you do not want, destroying your credit rating, limiting you employment opportunities etc.
Re:Bizarre (Score:5, Interesting)
No, just because my neighbor shared some vacation pictures of him and is family, no one is entitled to my vacation pictures. And just because I posted my curriculum vitae somewhere online, no one is entitled to all the dates and facts about my neighbor's life.
Re: Bizarre (Score:2)
You find it bizarre that (1) people wish to live their lives as they choose, (2) they don't want to change their lives so as to prevent an all-knowing Big Brother government? That they'd rather government change than they change?
I don't think it's bizzare. I think it's normal.
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Future oppression in much of the world is likely to be built on top of tools and products that today are being provided for our "convenience."
Like a computer operating system thats used by multiple millions of people worldwide, where the vendor of said operating system is giving out said operating system for free, not out of the goodness of their heart, but because they want to get it on EVERY computer in the world. "What's wrong with that?" you might ask... Consider that this operating system has been proven to send EVERYTHING you do on *your* computer to said operating system vendor.. The vendor hides all this spying behind a giant document wri
I'm sure they've already thought of this... (Score:1)
but how would this deal with identical twins? I mean, okay, the human eyeball Mk. 1 already has difficulties telling identical twins apart, simply based on facial features alone. So, what steps are being taken to insure that this won't be a problem for snagging a twin's credit card and using it?
Pay with who's face? (Score:1)
Do I have to use my face or can I pay with pay showing the camera a print of a random stranger's selfie I downloaded from facebook?
Pay With Your Face (Score:2)
You're missing the point (Score:1, Interesting)
People have commented on the pros and cons of bio metrics, etc. The real story here is the governments elimination of private transactions between individuals. To prevent crime, to beat the terrorists, for the CHILDREN!
Know your customer [wikipedia.org]
The whole point is the furtherance of the totalitarian state. For our own good.
Naw, that's just crazy talk! Warrantless access to email, browser histories, no private financial transactions, phone metadat
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Congratulations. I think you've managed to lower the mean IQ here by at least a point.
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Just PR spin (Score:1)
This is just a Public Relations scam where the practice of monetizing everything about an individual's online presence is presented as "this is actually good for you despite what all the security experts say." You don't use biometrics for "casual" things like buying a candy bar because it actually makes it easier for identity thieves to operate. And I certainly don't want my credit rating to drop simply because I'm not on Facebook (or any other "social" media") and some rich guy is not making money off my p
Oh, this is as stupid as it gets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, please, can I have a payment system that sucks all my money out of the bank because someone got a picture of my face.
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Do you really want to trust every minimum wage clerk out there with an easily defeatable system? All you really need to game this system is access to the equipment.
Technology for no reason (Score:2, Insightful)
Last time I checked, the lawn guy accepted cash. For fucks sake, cant we develop technology that solves problems instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. I just watched a masters level instructor have everyone create introductory videos, edit them, post them to the school website (Where they blocked the URL's) and generally waste an afternoon of everyone's time, when a simple paragraph of TEXT could have been done in five minutes. The only people that want a new payment system, are the ones that stand to pr
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The first wheel was probably made of wood and fairly square. It broke in just a few feet. The next one was a little rounder and made it a little further. Then, they bound the wood with metal and, sure enough, the wheel was improved. Today, it's made of all sorts of different materials, some of them are high end, and lasts longer than the vehicle while taking a goodly portion of the stress. It's wrapped in rubber and synthetics. It's capable of cushioning and absorbing massive amounts of force.
Why would you
Nothing could possibly go wrong (Score:2)
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this brilliant idea, and no surveillance agency or repressive government would ever misuse this constant stream of identity and location data. Never.
They would never come in their pants just thinking about all the possibilities to tighten their grip on financial transactions and the ability to track a person through every transaction they ever made. They would just never do that, ever.
I can pay with your face? (Score:3)
Great!
*grabs face, slams it against counter, drops body*
Hey, it works!
BRILLIANT! (Score:2)
Or Jim Phelps, because I'm old school.
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Or Jim Phelps, because I'm old school.
Jim was the man!! <Mission Impossible theme music begins to play...>
Cash for me, thanks. (Score:2)
FAIL FAIL FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)
"Whether you have an established credit history or not, the one thing most of us have, especially millennials, is an online social platform presence."
But some old duffers like me have virtually no "online social platform presence". No Facebook, no Linkedin, no Myspace, no Pinterest, no Instagram, no Twitter....I don't have any of that stuff. I'm happy that other people like those things, more power to them. It's just not my thing.
I realize that all that stuff is super popular and widely used, but I'm just not involved in any of it, the same way I'm not involved in model railroading or bowling or football. It's just not my thing.
If this becomes the way of the future then I suppose my near-perfect credit score and ability to buy stuff will soon wither away and I'll be left homeless, cold, and hungry, living in a cardboard box by the freeway.
As I cook my freshly-caught squirrel over a piece of burning tire, I'll berate myself, crying out, "If only I had made a Facebook account when I had the chance!!!"
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Which is definitely not a good thing. As someone who does use social media the only actual benefit is one potential way to organize events and an occasional amusing cartoon.
This is a rather poor trade off for the mass volume of disclosed personal data and the wide open police state door it provides. A huge part of the platform is the completely false sense that you can limit what you s
Seriously... (Score:2)