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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.
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
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.
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...."
"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...