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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.
I don't think it'll happen simply because pseudoanonymous is not the same as anonymous. There is a log of the transaction, and as has been established when there are patterns of long-term government collection of bulk data, that transaction, ten years later, could be tied to parties that participated if subsequent information eventually exposes who controlled what.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
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.
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...."
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.