Category: Uncategorized

Nearly men

16th June 2010by Consult Hyperion3 Comments

[Dave Birch] Had an interesting meeting with one of our customers, looking at their new technology strategy. One of the topics was, of course, NFC. NFC is in a funny state at the moment. There are no handsets — well, there’s one, the Samsung — that implement the new standard Single Wire Protocol (SWP). There are a few systems up and running here and there but they are all small scale and they almost all use the old Nokia 6212, a non-SWP handset released a couple of years ago.

Telefonica O2 aims to be the first operator with fully commercial payment services using the contactless technology, NFC (Near Field Communications). The carrier will launch such offerings, integrated into handsets, in the UK, Spain and the Czech Republic in late 2010 or early 2011, Michiel Van Eldik, Telefónica’s group director for new business and innovation, told Reuters. The firm already has a commercial pilot in the Czech city of Pilsen, using Nokia 6212 NFC phones, preloaded for use with local transport services.
[From Nokia looks for successor to RFID tags – Rethink Wireless]

I think Orange might quibble with this, as they hope to have commercial services operational in the UK (with Barclaycard) and in France (as part of Payez-Mobile). But anyway, there still seems to be a commitment to the technology. Partly because, as Liisa Kanniainen of Mobey Forum said in Singapore recently, the customer response has always been overwhelmingly positive and partly because so much effort has been expended.

Let’s see what a bona fide innovator has to say about this:

Aaron Greenspan. President & CEO, FaceCash: NFC is… “still not available in any of the SDKs we’re using from the major phone manufacturers, so it’s kind of irrelevant to us right now.”
[From MasterCard Will Open Its Doors to Entrepreneurs and Developers, Inviting Innovation – pymnts.com]

This wasn’t in the script. We were supposed to be engaging consumers by now, the handset manufacturers were supposed to have NFC chips in lots of models, the mobile operators were supposed to be ordering them, new services were supposed to be springing up on the NFC infrastructure. But, as of now, NFC is of no interest to innovators.

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Don’t call us

24th May 2010by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] I had a new phone line added to my home office recently: I find about one message a day there from companies offering to consolidate my debts into a single loan with one easy monthly payment and suggesting that a new law means that I may not have to repay my bank loans or credit card debts at all. Since there are very few people who know my home office number, I assume that either Virgin sold the new number details to some loan sharks or that they are simply autodialling all numbers except those registered with the telephone preference service (TPS). (To be fair, my home number is registered with the TPS and it never gets these calls, so the system clearly works, so instead of moaning about it on a blog I really should call the TPS again).

The TPS is a practical “sharp end” privacy issue. Another case study. A mobile phone number directory was launched in the UK. I immediately wondered how to get off of it. So I asked for advice on Twitter, and the posse (I prefer that to “mob”) told me to text “E” to 118 800, which I did. You could also opt out online, which so many people did that the system crashed.

But what’s interesting is how violently people now feel about their privacy. In an age when many are apparently happy to share intimate details of their lives on social networks – even shots of their husbands in their swimming trunks – it seems that we feel our mobile numbers are uniquely private.
[From BBC – dot.life: 118800 and a web revolution]

Ultimately, as you may remember, the uproar continued until…

the controversial mobile phone directory service 118 800 had been suspended.
[From Datonomy: UK mobile subscribers revolt against new directory]

So why were people so upset? Why don’t they do what I do? I’m not that bothered about the unsolicited calls to my home office number because all calls are screened: I don’t pick up the phone unless the number is recognised, and if it isn’t recognised I always let it go to answering machine. I never answer a call on my mobile phone unless the caller ID is displayed from my contact book: if you’re not in my contact book, you have to leave a voicemail. This works fine. But the issue isn’t the practicality, it’s the principle. As Robin Wilton wrote at the time

The issue here, to my mind, is one of informed consent. I can honestly claim that I have never knowingly disclosed my mobile number for the purpose of having it listed in a directory enquiries service.
[From Racingsnake – the blog of Future Identity: Mobile Directory Enquiries still broken]

Now I am theoretically ex-directory. (And to be fair, to date, I haven’t received any unsolicited commercial calls on my mobile.) The database of 42 million mobile phone numbers still remains, however.

identity, management, privacy, security

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2 + 2 = X

5th March 2010by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] I went to an enjoyable dinner (under Chatham House Rule) organised by DEMOS (a think tank that published a paper on privacy called "Putting People First" a couple of years ago) to discuss some issues around identity and privacy, particularly in the context of social networking. A couple of people raised that point that more privacy is, by itself, not necessarily a social benefit or a individual benefit. The "Privacy Taliban" should recognise economic activity as a social good, essentially.

It’s a controversial topic, but important, since hasty legislation could have dire consequences for the survival of newspapers.
[From The Spectator]

Indeed, and I was keen to press the point about helping content industries to reshape rather than preserve their business models a point of which there seemed to be fairly wide agreement. One area where there wasn't, and where my opinions were regarded as odd, was choice. I said that it was obvious to me that giving people choices about how much information they disclosed online (and to whom) was a practical way forward.

It turns out that the people who most benefit from the ability to set their own software preferences are well educated I.T.-saavy professionals with money — the people who suffer are the poorer and less educated users. So making privacy an individual option basically takes privacy away from the poor.
[From multicast » Blog Archive » On Facebook, Only the Rich Have Privacy]

This is surely correct. Now, I accept that the coming generation see privacy in a different way, and may have different norms, but we don't let them have a choice about whether to wear seatbelts or build houses that aren't to code, even though we acknowledge their perspectives.

Digital immigrants tend to think about privacy as the ability to conceal information from others. Digital natives instead share information within certain contexts, and with granular privacy controls on that information.
[From Is Online Privacy a Generational Issue? | GeekDad | Wired.com]

One topic that was raised was that the trawling of social networks by machines can take facts that are by themselves not particularly sensitive and match them together to obtain information that is sensitive. This is a topic discussed here before, and I don't want to rehash it, but it is interesting to delve into the commercial side of this. I think, because I'm optimistic about technology, that it ought to be possible for the "system" to mine data about me and offer me useful and relevant commercial relationships without knowing who I am. And I don't mean just knocking the name off.

digital identity electronic identity cards trust mobile, privacy

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Moving to Privacy 3.0

25th February 2010by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

[Dave Birch] A typically excellent piece from Jan Chipchase that I've continued to think about again and again since reading it. Commenting on the Facebook privacy stories that have were around recently, he asked whether the Facebook privacy "moment" is:

their Microsoft Moment, that point where the internal perception of themselves starts to significantly, negatively diverge from the public perception? Or will we look back on it as more akin to the iMac Floppy Moment where Apple launched said computer without, gasp, a floppy drive.
[From History's New Gatekeepers – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect]

The idea that Facebook is the crucible in which new notions of identity and privacy are being forged is, I think, true to some extent. First of all, let's remind ourselves where the fuss started.

To make privacy simpler, Facebook's controls will be changed to permit sharing with three groups: "only friends," "friends of friends," or "everyone."
[From How Facebook's New Privacy Changes Will Affect You – NYTimes.com]

Never mind whether you think these changes were good or bad, the point I want to raise is that they shape young persons very ideas of privacy. In a funny way, for the coming cyber cohort, Facebook's privacy settings are privacy. We struggle with notions of privacy because our brains still think in terms of index cards, databases and junk mail but my eldest son's generation (Generation Whatever) do not: their notions of privacy are founded in social networking. They have no problem using "unfriend" as a verb.

But what are they doing? They may have taken on board the facebookisation of identity, but I'm not convinced they understand the googleisation. I can see that replacing old ideas about identity with an identity model that is based on relationships makes sense and is a good basis for developing the necessary paradigm, but the idea of identity as digital footprint, defining a persona as the sum total of all of the data about them, doesn't seem right. The issue may be something about control, as the future privacy paradigm will rest on a more active version of privacy than the simple ability to be left alone.

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Vote for “Zits”

5th February 2010by Consult Hyperion2 Comments

[Dave Birch] In 1660, the English Parliament passed an act forbidding the export of gold or sliver, mistakenly thinking that exporting bullion made the nation poorer. After six months, His Majesties Council of Trade were petitioning the KIng and parliament to revoke the law, since not exporting bullion had, far from making the nation richer, made the nation considerably poorer. Such is the law of unintended consequences when it comes to politicians mucking up commerce. The effect of the law had been to persuade international trade to abandon London for various continental destinations: no merchants wanted to bring gold and silver into England if they couldn't get it out again, so there was no gold or silver around to settle transactions, so trade went where there was a working means of exchange. It always does.

Money is an enabler for trade. Whether in seventeenth century England, 21st century Zimbabwe or in the World of Warcraft. If there is a means of exchange, then trade will spring up on the back of it make everyone better off. What would we need to do to bring a new means of exchange into a new space like, for example, the Internet?

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About our forums and blogs

28th January 2010by Consult Hyperion

The Forum and blog are not-for-profit spaces for discussion and debate created by Consult Hyperion. Any surplus generated by them is distributed amongst a pool of charities that we have been proud to be able to support for some years. For this year, the charities supported are BUFFER, Action Medical Research, the Prostate Cancer Charity and Jubilee Action.

ID and payments

23rd December 2009by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] At ID World, Jan van der Sluis from Unisys made a very good presentation pointing out that the future of payments and identity are intertwined, a point that often underlays some of the threads here and at the Digital Money blog. You might even go further and say that the future of payments is the future of identity: one could envisage — whether you think it a good idea or not — a simple universal payment scheme that is linked to a single universal identity, a kind of galactic PayPal in which everyone participates. There are undeniable efficiencies to such a proposition, with instantaneous and very, very inexpensive payments a key element. If all payments were effected by the change of a few bytes in a database, surely everyone would be better off?

This is hardly a new idea. The paleo-future of ID cards has often encompassed universal payments. Nothing is new under the sun or, in one case, under the Sun News, since the Las Cruces Sun-News in New Mexico ran this piece by Jack Lefler about the possibility of a cashless society more than 40 years ago:

Some bankers envision nationwide system In which a single identification card would be used in place of all checks and almost all cash.
[From Paleo-Future: A Cashless Future Society? (1968)]

Off the top of my head, I can immediately see three different ways to achieve this ancient vision:

decoupled debit (link the ID card to a bank account and process transactions through the bank networks);
multi-applications (put a bank payment application on the ID card chip), or
e-money (create a pre-paid natiomal e-purse that can be accessed using the ID card).

Now for many reasons, some of which I have written about before, that middle option is far from optimal because the complexity and co-ordination problems outweigh any benefit (you don’t want criminals stealing ID cards, for example, when what they really want are payment cards). But suppose we decided to implement one or other of the other two?

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Support our charities, advertise here

1st December 2009by Consult Hyperion

In response to a number of enquiries,
we have decided to begin to accept advertising — for products and
services that may be relevant to people to electronic identity and authentication — in the form of 160×40 GIF
banner advertisements to run in the right hand margin. For a trial
period, these will be charged at £300 for a six month run.

Please note that all of the proceeds from advertising sales will go to the pool of charities supported by the Forum. Thank you for your support.

Support our charities, advertise here

1st December 2009by Consult Hyperion

In response to a number of enquiries, we have decided to begin to accept advertising — for products and services related to payment industry — in the form of 160×40 GIF banner advertisements to run in the right hand margin. For a trial period, these will be charged at £300 for a six month run.

Please note that all of the proceeds from advertising sales will go to the pool of charities supported by the Forum. Thank you for your support.

Biometrics 200n

2nd November 2009by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] I actually rather enjoyed my day out at Biometrics 2009 because it was an opportunity to catch up with old friends and see what the buzz is. Yes, you can have LinkedIn and Twitter, but there’s still no substitute for hanging out in the coffee area at a big conference. Some of the content was, though, somewhat reminiscent of Biometrics 2008, 7, 6… we’re still not at a mass market, and part of the reason is that no-one seems to know what that mass market is. Is it fingerprint scanners in every laptop? I doubt it. Is it logging in to your bank using voice authentication? Maybe. Is it using your National ID Card to get served in a pub? Doesn’t look like it at the moment.

Personally, based on a couple of sessions I sat in on, I thought there was some confusion about the proposition — not from everyone — and I suspect that at least part of the problem is that the major integrators come from the government and defence space, so their approach to the market and their product set reflects that. If you’ve made a living selling large-scale automatic fingerprint identification systems to law enforcement agencies, then it may be difficult to make the transition to selling improved authentication to banks. And there’s no reason to suspect that that improved authentication will be achieved using the same technologies anyway.

I happened to be sitting next to Forum friend Maxine Most from Acuity Inc, one of the world’s leading analysts of the international biometrics market, and she made a key point early on in the day: the mass market is about mobile phones, not PCs. This was a central element of my presentation on biometrics in the event space and was further amplified by the Precise Biometrics presentation advocating match-on-SIM going forwards. This, as an aside, suggests to me that there is a premium on biometric technologies that synergise with mobile phones — we’re talking about the mass commercial market here, not law enforcement and national security — so that really means voice recognition and voice authentication (I don’t buy the fingerprint-scanner-in-handset model in the mass market). A couple of people remarked that these biometrics didn’t seem to be getting much coverage compared to fingerprints, iris and the like, which I imagine is also a reflection on the government and law enforcement focus of the show.

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