Slashdot Mirror
The Payments World Really Wants To Know Who You Are (techcrunch.com)
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.
At least your fingerprints remain the same throughout your life.
This is perhaps the best argument for Bitcoin or some form of anonymous or at least pseudonymous payment system. Here's hoping someone will develop a form of digital cash that will gain mainstream acceptance.
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 ?
New things are always on the horizon
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."
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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?
I'm in trouble because my "face" is the monkey that picked up a camera and took a bunch of selfies with a big smile on his face.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=2144&bih=1060&q=monkey+self+portrait&oq=monkey+sel&gs_l=img.1.2.0l10.1093.3119.0.5910.10.10.0.0.0.0.121.716.8j2.10.0.ccynfh.3..0...1.1.64.img..0.10.710.C8qpzoMiU-A#imgrc=arP9c7LpaeNNyM%3A
Egads. When TFS said "pay with your face," I thought Mason Verger...
Nothing posted to
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
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 metadata collection, etc., etc., etc. These things are needed for FREEDOM!! Next you'll be warning about concentration camps! That would NEVER happen in the U.S.!!!
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
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 profile.
Is really what is meant.
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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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 profit from it.
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 that any system cheep enough to use in mass can be spoofed at a cost that will make it worthwhile. From what I can see the increased cost of spoofing will be offset by the impossibly of changing the pass code, but even if it is not people wont stop unless you can make it complexity impossible.
You can use special cameras or systems to read data, like vein patterns, that are not immediately visible but these reading methods stop being special the moment they start being bulk purchased. Worse, if you know, or can reverse-engineer the algorithms used to analyse the data then, the target machines, lacking in common scene, will always be easier to fool than their designers think.
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.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Great!
*grabs face, slams it against counter, drops body*
Hey, it works!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They want to know who I am? Mr. Dr. Anonymous Q. Coward, PhD. Pleased to meet'cha.
I look forward to having to go full John Travolta/Nicolas Cage when the biometric database is inevitably p0wned.
Or Jim Phelps, because I'm old school.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You are a cowardly jackass. Cows are revered in some places. Jackasses are just the body for an asshole.
I'll stay with cash when paying for goods in stores. Nothing beats a traceless transfer of funds.
"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!!!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Drama queen. Personal info is transient. Next year you may have changed your political views, your tastes, your neighborhood, even your sex. Most people don't seem to realize that gathering personal data is a precarious business model, especially in the long term. Your information is dated. What's more, you can spread disinformation, which make their jobs harder. Google has little relevant info about me. I am not who they think I am.
Get the hell out of my business.
Some chemotherapies sometmes erase fingerprints.
TFA completely did not mention that chucknorris is a valid color (it's a shade of red); likewise, OprahWinfrey is blue, MrT is black, and BarackObama is a faded green. (And yes, those are defined by the standard, they're not browser quirks.)
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.
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...."
There are mix pools (like mixmaster for email, but for bitcoins) where all the bitcoins go in the mix pool and are shuffled and then distributed to the payees. Some of these are "fire and forget" too. Captcha:anarchy