A library of snippets
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing Walmart, alleging that the retail giant “turned a blind eye” while fraudsters used its money transfer service to fleece consumers of hundreds of millions of dollars.
From FTC sues Walmart for facilitating money transfer fraud:
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From abortion to climate change to guns, larger banks face the prospect of a growing backlash from Republican-led states over their stances on environmental and social issues… On one side, banks are under pressure from outside activists, including some shareholders, as well as many of their own employees, to take progressive stances on climate change, gun control and abortion rights. On the other side, conservative officials in GOP strongholds are testing banks’ willingness to step into such debates by threatening to hurt their bottom line.
From Red states’ pushback on guns, abortion, climate puts banks in bind | American Banker:
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A total of over £1.3 billion was stolen through fraud and scams in 2021: unauthorised fraud was £730.4 million and APP fraud was £583.2 million, with nearly 40 per cent of APP losses due to impersonation scams.
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Bank customers in China’s Henan province say the health code system is being abused: when they tried to withdraw their savings, their health codes spontaneously turned red. It came after three local banks in the central province froze as much as $1.5 billion worth of deposits, causing hundreds of clients to travel to the city of Zhegzhou to try to retrieve their money. They found that when they tried to scan their health QR code at the city’s shops and public transport stations, their code turned red — indicating they had been infected with the virus. Some were then forced into quarantine or detained by local authorities. On Wednesday, five officials were punished for abusing the system, according to state media.
From Pediatricians rally to dispel medical misinformation on TikTok – Coda Story:
This is such an interesting story on so many levels.
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EVE Online, the long-running sci-fi MMO best-known for its sprawling, expensive space battles will soon get… integration with Microsoft Excel. EVE developer CCP Games announced the collaboration with Microsoft today at its annual fanfest event, saying that the Javascript tool would allow players to “seamlessly” transfer data from the game to a spreadsheet in order to “help players access and calculate everything from profit margins to battle strategy.” CCP says more detail on the collaboration will be available later in the year.
From Sci-fi virtual world EVE Online is getting Microsoft Excel support – The Verge:
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Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has stated that Bitcoin (BTC) is the only cryptocurrency he considers outside the SEC’s regulatory purview.
According to the SEC’s Chairman, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is the only digital currency believed to be a commodity, which is subject to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
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And seeing Eve Maler, the Venn Queen, give her keynote at Identiverse and say that IS-A-PERSON is the most important credential of all (she is 100% correct, as you would expect) but also note the importance of wallets gave me an idea
The UK’s Payment System Regulator (PSR) wants to encourage the use of account-to-account retail transactions using open banking and is setting up a strategic working group with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Treasury to work out the best way to do this. They have identified four key issues that will need to be addressed to accelerate A2A use in retail. These are:
Overall functional capability: We need to address the particular user needs of retail purchase transactions (for example, retailers’ ability to trigger the payment with the customer’s consent when the customer is not present) – and to have operational and technical standards that support this. There may be a need for new functionality, but we assume much of the existing functionality can be reused or repurposed. We want to look at different retail uses to find if the current functionality works for users and, if not, how issues or gaps could be overcome.
Practical dispute processes: Retail transactions bring new risks, such as unsatisfactory goods being delivered after the payment, or the retailer not acting in good faith. We need to ensure all the parties involved in the transaction act together to minimise these risks, that refunds can easily be initiated, and that the right processes ensure that customer disputes can be resolved efficiently.We will also need to understand if further protection is needed in certain instances (for example, in cases of fraud, or if a seller goes bankrupt), so that consumers and retailers alike are confident using account-to-account payments.
Widespread access and appropriate reliability: Retailers and consumers must be able use their preferred payment method when they want to. We want to ensure that the system works properly for the end-to-end journey for a retail transaction, and that customers don’t have any problems when they make their purchase.
We also want to explore what the seller needs to feel assured that they will be paid, and ensure that there is sufficient capacity to match the potential uptake in the future. There are several ways to achieve access and reliability. The technical build is one, but there could be alternative approaches such as providing assurances for future payments, or considering contingency options.
A sustainable funding model: For account-to-account payments to work in retail, we need a commercial and pricing model that ensures all parties receive sufficient compensation for the services they provide, and can continue to invest in new products and further innovation. We need to investigate how these payments can provide an opportunity for all parties, including account providers, to receive compensation, and the process for this.
It’s been a big week for the digital identity sector in the UK this week because of the imposition of age verification for dult services. This means that I’ve been thinking about adult service a lot this week. I realise it is a sensitive topic to cover in family-oriented publication, but it is important, so I will do my best to highlight the implications without offending.
Let me begin with a tweet from Gillan Branstetter, Communications Strategist at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in which she said that “The biggest red flag to me about crypto is most sex workers wanted nothing to do with it. I would trust a single sex worker on digital finance and security more than a conference hall of VCs and tech bros”. I remember noting this at the time because I was curious as to wether the evident demand for adult services would translater into a demand for cryptocurrency.
Thinking about this reminds me that some months ago, for reasons that are too complicated (and too boring) to go into here, I was able to ask the operator of web studio businesses about this and she told me that they had no interest in Bitcoin, only Tether. What they, and their models, wanted was dollars. Their whole payments operation was geared to getting payment in dollars, to paying their suppliers and performers with dollars, to saving and investing dollars and to holding dollars in legitimate regulated institutions where they would be not cheated. Tethers were the way, as they saw it, to hold dollars.
I just logged in to a popular adult side to create an account for research purposes — as Alexander dePfeffel Johnson — and found that I could choose between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Tether and some other cryptocurrencies to pay with. Not that I bothered with any of them, because using cryptocurrency is such a hassle, but it did make me wonder whether there is now any real take up of cryptocurrencies in the adult sector. A quick survey of the available literature would seem to indicate that adult services represent a tiny fraction of Bitcoin transactions, for example.
(There were some tokens specifically designed for use in the adult services world, but when I last looked they were somewhere between 94% and 100% from their all-time highs.)
That in turn reminded me of the BBC’s recent documentary on the technology of the modern payment card (The Secret Genius of Modern Life
Series 1: Bank Card), in which the presenter Hannah Fry explored the role of the adult sector in the evolution of the modern bank card industry. She made the point that rampant chargebacks in the early days of the internet drove the rapid development of authorisation and authentication techniques for “card not present” transactions.
Why am I so fascinated by all of this? Well, as one adult industry executive summarised rather nicely for the Financial Times, “The story of the porn industry is the story of trying to take payments”. Indeed. And there was also a very interesting Slate podcast that touched on this, featuring Samantha Cole talking about her book “How Sex Changed the Internet, and the Internet Changed Sex”. She made the point that a great many payment-related innovations came directly from the demands of the adult sector: subscriptions, paywalls, online card use and so on.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “Middle Men”, but it’s an enjoyable 2009 fictionalised version of the story of the men who invented online commerce by figuring out how to take credit card numbers over the internet. The adult industry was early into the space, has constantly evolved paid content technology and business models, and has all sorts of experience with anti-fraud techniques and all the rest of it. And it is certainly true that well beyond the internet, the demands of the adult sector have driven technological development.
(The movie, by the way, has an amazing backstory, because the producer Christopher Mallick was one of the real-life inspirations behind the film.)
The idea that adult services have pushed the development of new technologies is well-established and it is clearly especially true about the world of payments. But I am now beginning to wonder if they might also have a similar impact on the wolrd of identity. The UK has just implemented age verification for adult services, in common with many US states, and the initial statistics seem to show a substantial uptake in the use of new identity technologies, not mention a substantial uptake in the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Proton, the Swiss-based company behind the top VPN app, said it had experienced a more than 1,800 per cent increase in daily sign-ups from UK-based users. Similarly, Nord said there had been a 1,000 per cent increase in UK purchases of VPN subscriptions.
Under the UK’s new Online Safety Act, the regulator has outlined age verification methods that it considers “highly effective” (whichis the compliance benchmark). These are:
With millions of monthy users, it seems that a substantional fraction of the British population will soon have experience in using age verification, and not only for adult sites. This will mean that it will be easier to bring in verifiable credentauls for other services, meaning that both privacy and security will be enhanced.
Of course, in time, the new identity technologies and the new payment technologies will come together. If I can have a pseudonymous wallet from (for example) my bank and I can use that wallet to hold central bank digital currency and I can use that central bank digital currency at an adult side without the adult site ever knowing my real name or any other personal details, and the central bank having no idea who it was who used the currency at the adult site, then we have a much better infrastructure for the post-industrial always-on society. For this to work, the wallet needs to provide two functions to the adult sides: a persistent and unique site-specific identifier, and a cryptographic proof that the wallet owner is over 18.
Perhaps it will be the adult sector that drives the adoption of convenient and effective identity services just as it drove the adoption of convenient and effective payment services!
A really interesting episode of Brett King’s “Breaking Banks” podcast: a very comprehensive report on China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) trial. With global experts including Richard Turrin, Henri Arslanian, Ruth Wandhöfer (as well as me, of course), vox populi on the ground in China and informed discussion about the lessons that might be learned.xxx
China’s digital yuan wallet has been downloaded by 261 million people – about a fifth of the country’s population – and been used for transactions worth 87.5 billion yuan ($13.8 billion).
From China’s digital yuan wallet downloaded by 261m individuals:
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SONNET FRISBIE of Morning Consult
The e-CNY is mostly being used for online shopping
Of those who said they downloaded the e-CNY app (n=186), the largest shares use it for online shopping (72%) and paying for public services, such as public transportation (67%).
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Three US Senators will introduce a bill that would stop US app stores from hosting any app that supports payments with China’s digital yuan, saying Beijing could use it to spy on US citizens.
From US Bill Would Ban Digital Yuan from Google, Apple App Stores:
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Snippings