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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.
Someone once said that any technology advanced enough will appear as magic to someone who isn't used to it. (I'm sure if I weren't lazy I could google-fu who said that).
There are places around the world where economics and science dictated they skipped over the computer generation. They went straight from disconnected villages to smart phones. A lot of the tech and what can and can't be done with it was never learnt. The lady in the summary wasn't necessarily gullible, or stupid, nor did she believe the phone was "magic" I'm sure. However, how the phone worked was probably almost magical, with an unexplained technology she couldn't fathom how it might work.
Going from simple life to smart phone life, it's easy to see how someone can be fooled by what exactly is possible.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
Well, she'll "understand the limits of the technology" a lot more now. That's how humans learn: through experience.
"They think, because it was on a smartphone, it seems real and credible."
This is no different from "but I have seen it on TV, so it must be true.
Or any media that has been invented. The most memorizeable instance is probably the panic during "War of the Worlds"
bickerdyke
I'm sorry that you feel so insecure about your own intellect.
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:
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".
Congrats, you win the dumbest comment of the day award.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Is allowing morons to use technology. It's the source of virtually every issue on Earth, and the solution is simple: if someone can't demonstrate the knowledge required to design and build a thing they shouldn't be allowed to utilize that thing.
Cool, get back to us when you've figured out how you teach someone how to design and build a device that they're not allowed to use.
The last millenium of technological and economic progress has been driven by specialization. Instead of everyone having to learn how to grow crops, hunt for food, dig a well, weave clothes, build a home, etc. we've all specialized. One person learns how to grow crops. He sells it to someone who hunts (or grows) livestock. Who hires someone to dig a well. Who buys clothes pre-made by someone else. Who hires people to build their home. Because each individual can concentrate on a small field of human knowledge, we've been able to increase the depth of knowledge in those specific fields by leaps and bounds - much faster than when everyone was a generalist who had to know how to do everything.
A side effect of this specialization is that everyone is pretty ignorant of fields they did not specialize into. To poke fun of people for not knowing as much as you in your chosen specialization is very immature, small-minded, and hypocritical. This app is basically the equivalent of jocks beating up nerds for being bad at sports. Or your friend who is hip with fashion telling you that the bowtie is back in style and you should totally wear it to the frat party. It's a mean-spirited prank which tries to cast as stupidity the ignorance via specialization that is essential to a modern functional society. Shame on the tech guys who thought this would be funny.
I don't believe you. Nor does, I imagine, anyone else. I would suggest you look up the Dunning-Kruger effect, as the mere fact that you are making these claims leads me to believe that you actually know relatively little about fabrication, otherwise you would realize how outlandish they sound.
You should read the reviews for flashlight apps for your phone.
"5 stars, very bright!"