Soon you could be giving the finger to supermarket queues and identity theft if new ideas go ahead.
I can see a lot of good coming out of the current drive to eliminate cash using biometric data to identify purchasers, it’s a lot harder to mug an old granny of her fingerprints than her purse for instance and there’s an interesting development in Biometrics that is raising eyebrows, expectations and hands in the air in almost equal proportions.
In a recent article by the BBC it was claimed:
"Pay By Touch" allows customers to settle their supermarket bill with a fingerprint rather than a credit card. With three million customers in the United States, this payment system is now being tested in the UK, in three Co-op supermarkets in Oxfordshire.
Once a customer registers, and has their finger scanned, they can use a fingerpad for payment, with the money directly debited from their bank account.
Of course there are very real fears about identity theft and rightly so but if it’s handled properly then I can see it being a boon to consumers and retailers alike, mind you there is a list of people who make their living out of handling cash who won’t be too happy, Securicor, Securitas, foreign exchanges, bank tellers etc. and that completely ignores the black economy who will be even more opposed, bank robbers, muggers, drug dealers, illegal workers, cash in hand employers, illicit minicabs etc.
So let’s address peoples’ fears of identity theft, if someone steals your identity and commits crimes you are not liable, it's simply a case of proving where you were when the said crime was committed, if you used your fingerprint to purchase goods in the co-op in Leicester at the same time as some thief used it to buy a car in Wales then it's fairly obvious to your local Leicestershire copper that you couldn't have been in two places simultaneously isn't it?
If you think resisting Biometric recognition systems will improve your civil liberties then you'd better cancel your bank accounts, send back your credit cards, not drive, not pay any bills, not attend any social services, not send your kids to school, not join a library or indeed any council run club or association and if you do all that and a host of things that didn't pop into my head while writing this, then you may just be able to avoid having any personal information stored about you and used at the collector's discretion, oh yes I forgot, better not go out either as the CC Cameras may see you.
Of course there will be cases where it’s hard to prove and mistakes will be made, and you can bet my body weight in yesterday’s unsold copies of the daily mail that the press will make the most of them to whip up some more paper selling hysteria but will it be any more prevalent than current cases of mistaken identity?
I'm more concerned about companies selling my data to marketers than I am about identity theft and I'm afraid that goes on all the time.
I currently receive over 400 pieces of spam email a day, harvesters of email addresses will account for most of that and no doubt writing on here has increased my visibility to these “people”, but there is the odd piece of snail-mail (actual physical mail that comes through the letterbox) that turns up unsolicited but bristling with my personal details that can only have come from someone who's bought my details.
Sadly there is no easy solution to this problem, most spammers (name given to people who send you stuff you don't want and didn't ask for) are based offshore, in countries where there is little to no control or possibility of redress, I know I’ve tried and hosts in countries like Latvia are extremely unlikely to even reply to a complaint let alone do anything about it.
By its very nature the internet is a very difficult place to police effectively, just look at how few convictions there are for that most vile crime, child pornography, international co-operation is required and huge amounts of money are spent to track down just a few individuals a year.
Having been involved in ecommerce I can tell you that even when I had proof of fraudulent behaviour, someone trying to use someone else’s credit card to purchase goods from me, the police couldn’t do anything as the funding wasn’t available, how much less are they going to prioritise spam?
So is there anything we can do I hear you ask, well maybe not but it’s a rhetorical question anyway so there!
And the answer is, funnily enough, about the same as the Americans came up with in the Wild West during the 1800's, look at their problems a huge country, no police, no money to pay for police, no effective central organisation to ensure that local governments instigated police departments etc. sound familiar?
Towns set up their own police and eventually central government took a hand and legislated them into existence everywhere whilst also creating central agencies to oversee and handle cross border issues.
Ok ok I'm not claiming the American way is neccessarily the only or right way but it does bear striking similarities to the current situation on the net.
We can protect ourselves from viruses with mail checking programs and we can set complex spam identification rules on servers to filter it out somewhat, we can continue reporting spammers to various organisations, Spamcops, pinkertons, the local sherrif etc. but in the end they will keep sending it and we will have to keep dealing with it until there is an internet wide police force.
Now if someone could invent a way of doing away with spam automatically, that would be news, I might have to mail everyone I know and tell them about it ;)
Take care,
John
ffriar.com
BBC Article:
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6129084.stm )
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