In our Live 5 for 2021 we raised micro-location as an area of technology where we expect to start seeing significant advances being made. UWB (Ultra Wideband) is just starting to get traction in consumer electronics and we believe that this will trigger innovation in micro-location technology.
When consumers install software on their devices, they often perform some sort of risk evaluation, even if they don’t consciously realise it. They might consider who provides the software, whether it is from an app-store, what social media says, and whether they have seen any reviews. But what if once a piece of software had been installed, the goalposts moved, and something that was a genuine software tool at the time of installation turned into a piece of malware overnight.
This is what happened to approximately 300,000 active users of Chrome ad blocking extension Nano Adblocker. You see, at the beginning of October, the developer of Nano Adblocker sold it to another developer who promptly deployed malware into it that issued likes to hundreds of Instagram posts without user interaction. There is some suspicion that it may have also been uploading session cookies.
I recently had the pleasure of “attending” the LendIt Fintech – Europe 2020 virtual event. Now, much of the content covered banking services for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), an area that personally I’m not particularly familiar with, but one that is gaining more focus in the news of late. One thing that struck me was the potential disruption of traditional business banking brought about by open banking.
At Consult Hyperion, we have already seen the pandemic accelerate the adoption of contact-free payments in the face to face environment as customers have become wary of catching COVID by touching shared devices, such as self-service terminals and PIN pads. The use of personal devices for payments is hardly new but the attraction of an in-app/in-store version of mobile payments, whereby the consumer uses an app on their own device to interact with the retailer or service provider and pay for services, has just increased dramatically. Solutions for parking (RingGo) and for restaurants (like the Wahaca app, powered by Judopay) were already demonstrating the benefits of such an approach for customers and businesses before COVID struck.
In the 2002 movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character has his eyes surgically replaced so he can avoid being identified by the all-pervasive retina scanning system that the state uses to track people… and of course, uses to show targeted ads to people. This is a rather dystopian view of the broad application of biometrics technology. However, judging by a lawsuit targeting Macy’s for their use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology in their stores, it seems that staying anonymous in the bricks and mortar world is becoming a little more like the movie. Whilst you may not require surgery, you may soon require something akin to glasses and a fake beard to avoid being tracked. The issue here is that Clearview AI has been scraping images from publicly viewable sources on the web for a while, enabling them to create a database of facial biometrics against which to match captured facial images. Amongst the sources of this data are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Vimeo, with some of these companies having sent cease and desist letters to Clearview AI for breach of their terms of service. The aim it seems is for Clearview AI to create a one-to-many facial recognition solution that can identify an individual from only an image of their face from anyone who is in a photo or video on the web. Based on a report on Buzzfeed, they were working with over 2000 companies as of February 2020, and they are probably not alone, so perhaps we should be concerned.
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