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."

Comments

It's not just first time users

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a smartphone for years. I'm an IT professional in a first-world country. And even I have difficulty at times discerning what's legit and what's not. Spammers are getting better and better, and if it weren't for the fact that I use a unique email address for every company with which I do business (something not accessible to the vast majority of computer users), I'm not sure that I wouldn't have been taken in a time or two.

This is an interesting sociological issue, and I think it's likely to get much worse before it gets any better, if it ever does get better.

Outbreaks of "Genital Retraction Syndrome".

[Anonymous Coward]

In all seriousness, this really has little to do with technology.

Into the 1990s and even the 2000s we've seen numerous outbreaks of "Genital Retraction Syndrome" in various African nations.

In essence, these outbreaks are cases of mass hysteria where people mistakenly think that their genitalia are shrinking or even being "stolen".

This is how the Wikipedia article currently describes it:

In the 1970s and early 1980s, newspapers reported incidents of genital shrinking in Western Nigeria. Since late 1996, a small-scale epidemic of genital shrinking was reported in West African nations. Victims in the African outbreaks often interpreted the experience as genital theft, accusing someone with whom they had contact of "stealing" the organ and the spiritual essence, causing impotence. The perceived motive for theft was associated with local occult belief, the witchcraft of juju, to feed the spiritual agency or to hold the genital for ransom. Social representations about juju constitute consensual realities that propose both a means and motivation for genital-shrinking experience.[45]

The epidemic began in Nigeria and Cameroon, and spread to Ghana, Ivory Coast and Senegal by 1997.[45] Cases were reported in Cotonou, Benin where mobs attacked individuals accused of the penis theft and authorities ordered security forces to curb the violence, following the deaths of five people by vigilantes.[58] Later reports of outbreak suggest a spread beyond West Africa, including the coverage of episodes in Khartoum, Sudan in September 2003;[59] Banjul, Gambia in October 2003;[45] and Kinshasa, DR Congo in 2008.[60]

Unlike AIDS, this is something that men who think they're affected can check for themselves. All that a man needs to do is check if his penis is still present, and that its size is remaining consistent.

Even without cell phones and technology, we'd still see misdiagnoses in Africa, even when this misdiagnosis can easily be proven to be wrong or nonsensical like in the cases of "Genital Retraction Syndrome".

Re:People have blind trust into technology

[bill_mcgonigle]

I have seen it on TV, so it must be true.

Psychologically, it's a "voice of authority". Humans seem to be hard-wired to accept authority. It's a good idea for keeping kids from being eaten by lions.

By adulthood, humans should learn to reject arbitrary authority. But it seems to be very easy for people to delay that maturation by decades or even forever - they accept gods, presidents, and televisions as "voices of authority" and obey their commands.

It's really not good for anybody to have adults thinking and behaving like children, except for those who wish to control them.