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.

Comments

Bitcoin

[Crowd Computing]

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.

Re:Bitcoin

[TWX]

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.

Re:Bitcoin

[XXongo]

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

[Lennie]

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

[Kardos]

Because the alternatives also have tolerances and can be defeated, and after risk managing it, it's cheaper

Re:Biometrics is just silly

[XXongo]

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.

Bizarre

[cold fjord]

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."

Re:Bizarre

[Falos]

>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 don't need, and shitty job offers I don't want. I concede that not using ledditblrgram burdens me with free time I have to fill with the likes of /.

>Biometrics data mining for payments security also reaches the unbanked crowd, those who have healthy online histories but might not necessarily
>healthy online histories

fucking lol.

Re:Bizarre

[Sique]

Ah, the Facebook fallacy: "Because some people share some private information about themselves, it's totally o.k. that some powerful organisation is entitled to all private information of all of us."

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.

Oh, this is as stupid as it gets.

[kuzb]

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.

Technology for no reason

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Longevity?

[ComputerGeek01]

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.

I can pay with your face?

[Opportunist]

Great!

*grabs face, slams it against counter, drops body*

Hey, it works!

FAIL FAIL FAIL

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"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!!!"