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The Woman Whose Phone 'Misdiagnosed HIV' (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on BBC about a woman in Kenya, who downloaded a prank app that noted that she has HIV simply by "analyzing her fingerprint." While many people would have not trusted an app for such kind of diagnosis in the first place, and some would have figured that something is amiss about the app, the story tells the tale of people who are increasingly finding it hard to deal with the technological advances they see. From the report: Esther sells water on the side of the road in Kenya for a few dollars a day. She also owns a smartphone and ownership of such a device should, according to most of the received wisdom, empower its owner. But in fact it did quite the opposite for her when she acquired an app. It claimed to diagnose HIV simply by analysing her fingerprint on the touch screen. When researchers met her at her roadside workplace, she was worried. "She did not know if it was true and she was panicking," said researcher Laura de Reynal, who worked on a year-long study into the experiences of first-time smartphone users in Kenya. "And she wasn't the only one, there were others that came to us worried about this app and those were just the ones that were willing to speak out." The app was in fact a prank and anyone reading the comments on Google's Play Store would have seen that. However, many first-time smartphone users in Kenya get hold of apps via a friend's Bluetooth connection, rather than downloading them via the net, in order to save data. But the prank would not have been apparent via a Bluetooth share. "People are not able to understand the limits of the technology," said Ms de Reynal. "They think, because it was on a smartphone, it seems real and credible."
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I also don't think this woman should be criticized. When I see the stupid things people who have grown up with technology do (as opposed to growing up dirt poor in Africa), she's no worse off than they are.
The smartphone did "empower her." It turns out that life does not work in dichotomies the way binary thinkers assume it must because, for whatever reason, that is all they can see. Did this new tool result in a net loss of capabilities for her? No, it just introduced a nasty unintended side effect based on her ignorance and a particular method of app distribution.
well, this sort of machine is seen in films and on TV (think: Star Trek, ...), obviously all of Star Trek is not true, but which bits are and which are not? Then there is an X Prize competition to make a Medical tricorder, so think before you laugh at her.
This was the most interesting part of the article (ignore the "Firefox operating system" error):
This is a great reminder of why I won't donate to moz://a.
Instead of spending money to improve Firefox, which badly needs some real improvement, moz://a squandered money researching the gullibility of third-worlders.
With Firefox now only around 5% of the browser market, and having only 0.03% (yes, a very small fraction of just 1%!) of the mobile browser market, wasting money on nonsensical "research" like this is the very last thing they should be doing.
Moz://a won't be able to have any influence on how third-worlders use the Internet if these third-worlders are using Chrome or some other non-Firefox browser. Since most third-world Internet users use a mobile device, Firefox's 0.03% of the market already means they're irrelevant.
Improving Firefox's performance, and reducing its memory usage, would be a lot more beneficial for these third-worlders than doing more "research" like this into their gullibility.