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Google Helps Homeless Street Vendors Get Paid By Cashless Consumers
An anonymous reader writes Starting today Seattle pedestrians can no longer pat their pockets and claim to have no cash when offered a copy of the ironically-named Real Change weekly newspaper by a homeless street vendor. Google has spent two years working with the Real Change organization to develop a barcode-scanning app which lets passers-by purchase a digital edition with their mobile phones. Google's Meghan Casserly believes the Real Change app — available on Android and iOs — represents the first of its kind in North America.
Or just ignore them and walk by without a word. That might piss them off enough to justify calling the cops on them, which at least gets them a warm night and a meal. It's for their own good.
If the seller is to get the money then the bar code must be unique to that seller, so it's not the general bar code of the magazine that's getting scanned.
The phone then reports this seller's ID to some central server. Does it also report geolocation data? (Is there any non-free-software app nowadays that doesn't?) How many people get this data? Google and the magazine company (and any government agency that asks for it)?
So smartphone users are being used to report homeless people's movements around the city. Or at the very least, it's open to that type of abuse.
Am I wrong?
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You must live in a nice part of Seattle. I work in the Pioneer Square area, and several of the Real Change sellers in that area and the ID are quite obviously either drunk, high or mentally ill, and pushy to the point of verbal abuse if you try to ignore them.
I do not support Real Change because while it gets the sellers money for a meal and some basic needs, it does not encourage them to go beyond that and get off the street altogether. I want to support organizations that support homeless folks in moving *out* of being homeless, rather than merely making it easier to *be* homeless.
...scanhandling.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
You should really take a step back and think about the numbers of Wall Street tycoons and Golden parachute CEOs you are likely to see walking past homeless people.
In all likelihood 99% of those people wearing suits have nothing to do with the activities you described.
Equating suit with "screws people over for a living" is completely stupid.