Amazon tests new palm-reading technology that helps confirm your identity when making a purchase. Will you trade safety and security for convenience…more than you have already? Alfonzo Rachel, Bill Whittle and Stephen Green explore the implications of this new ID credential system.
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7 replies on “Amazon Palm-Reading Tech Adds Convenience, but What Does It Take Away?”
Regarding Bill’s point on socialised medicine, you might like a post I did on the NHS back in Nov 2019. I should say that the point I make about the NHS being beyond criticism can be multiplied by 10 in these Covid ridden times.
When a safety net becomes a straitjacket – Bill Whittle
Watch a tutorial for WeChat to see just how intoxicating convenience at the cost of privacy can be. WeChat. Another delightful import from China.
Your resistance to this tech isn’t really going to matter. I’ve been watching how the tech has advanced over the decades and they (companies or governments) start making it really inconvenient if you don’t include yourself. The convenience of it all will collectively grab everyone. Eventually even people who live off-grid will find it very challenging to live in this “modern” society.
Whenever you see or hear “in the cloud” all that means is it is on or traverses the internet. It actually comes from an old diagramming graphic that shows local to WAN (Wide Area Network, most commonly the internet but not always) connections where the local is drawn out and anything done on the WAN was depicted as a nice fluffy cloud.
Thus this comment is diagrammed as —
Me > My Network > My Router > {The Cloud} > BillWhittle.com > {The Cloud} > Your ___ (Whatever you’re using, LAN computer, phone etc.)
The idea of “cloud computing” gained popularity because it allowed vendors to offer high tech gizmos to low tech consumers. You don’t have to understand how to purchase components, install, configure a server, configure and create monitoring connections and viewing points with secure authorization, etc. — To set up a security camera system. All you need to do is buy a Ring or other such device and follow a few simple instructions (which even then are not always so simple to non-technical people) and voila! You have your own security camera system.
It’s crap compared to what I use but it’s still better than no cameras at all.
There’s a price for that. You have no idea how it works. You have no control over anything at all once it leaves your possession and hits “the cloud”.
All of my cameras are local to me only. I don’t even let them see a real DNS server so they cannot “talk” over “the cloud”. If you don’t know what that means, you’re exactly why cloud computing was invented.
If Stephen Green thinks Apple never uploaded his facial recognition data from his iPhone he’s more naive than I would ever have suspected of him. Apple does all kinds of iffy, underhanded and outright dangerous things to advance itself. So does Google/Android and in that regard there’s no getting away from it if you want to have more data handling and computing power than existed in total over the entire world 100 years ago in the palm of your hand.
Apple and Google phones keep track of everything you do every day. Oh, they might not know or care that you selected a Filet O’ Fish sandwich instead of a Big Mac at McDonalds for lunch, but they know you went to McDonalds for lunch. That kind of thing. Any decent modern phone isn’t a phone except as a courtesy and a feature.
It’s a handheld computer with about 80% of it’s brains “in the cloud” and a whole lot of useful things like a GPS chip to tell you when your next turn is coming up. If you use any sort of navigation or mapping app on your phone, it’s not getting its location by triangulating cell phone tower signals. It’s not picking up local anything at all, it’s getting a GPS signal from a satellite. That signal can locate you down to about/within 3 feet of where you’re actually standing.
No decent phone that costs more than about $80 is without a GPS chip. That GPS chip is there and functioning whether you use mapping and navigation apps or not.
Phones are in constant contact with cell towers. They have to be to work. They can send or receive anything the cellular provider wants them to. The provider doesn’t log it’s own data as “billable”, it doesn’t count towards your data, voice or text on your phone plan. For all you know that phone is uploading or downloading GigaBytes of data every day and it probably is.
So they know where you had lunch even if they don’t know what you ate. If you used any kind of card to pay for it and they have an agreement with that card provider, then they know what you ate too.
Some of that stuff you can “turn off”. I put that in quotes because while you might have told the phone, Apple or Google that you don’t want them collecting that data on you, you have no way to know if they’re really honoring your wishes or not.
So do I keep my phone powered off, wrapped in copper mesh and tinfoil, the battery removed and only turn it on when it can’t see the sky for GPS location?
Nope.
Why not?
I don’t care if they know that I stopped at McDonalds for lunch. I really don’t care about most of the things “they” want to know about. Because at this point in time “they” are just trying to pull dollars out of my wallet and numbers out of my bank account by selling things to me. That’s fine with me because what I do have control over is to block all their advertising vectors to me. I don’t see their ads, their promotions or their helpful “suggestions” so on my “ledger” I’m a failure to their purposes.
Right now I’m able to keep their influence over me to a minimum. That makes me a bust to them.
Does that mean this sort of thing cannot and will not ever be used to some more nefarious purpose? Hell no it doesn’t.
Mr. Rachel is so right. What one doesn’t believe causes the problems. Any tool can serve a positive benefit or inflict a negative impact depending on the morality of the wielder. More than any collection innovation however, virtually unlimited, nearly effortlessly retrieved data storage is the fundamental concern. As an example, Mr. Green has faith that Apple is keeping his personal identification secure and protected from abuse. I pray that’s true. But the fact that Apple has no problem delivering every byte of their Chinese customers’ data over to an entity regulated by the CCP might give one pause. Can one’s conscience stop at the Pacific Ocean’s shoreline?
I wouldn’t fear the new tech so much if our culture hadn’t changed so drastically. A simple example is rewatching The Cannonball Run – it’s hard to believe that the movie takes place in the same country that we live in today
The subject of personal privacy is a complex one to which individuals respond differently. I read a book by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter: The Light of Other Days, in which personal privacy is completely eliminated via a futuristic technology that, once invented, could not be stopped. The human condition was drastically changed forever.
I do not advocate a society in which individual privacy is destroyed; however, change is inevitable. Perhaps, by our own definitions, we are screwed, and I suppose I am now too old to accept such things in my own life.