A library of snippets
xxx
Congressman Brad Sherman went on an anti-Bitcoin and cryptocurrency rant where he dismissed the financial technology as only useful for criminals and warned that these new types of assets have the potential to threaten the U.S. dollar’s dominance over the global financial system.
From Congressman Warns Bitcoin Is A Threat To The U.S. Dollar:
xxx
xxx
A former American treasury secretary agrees. In 2016, while still in office, Jack Lew told an audience in Washington: “It is a mistake to think that [sanctions] are low-cost. And if they make the business environment too complicated, or unpredictable, or if they excessively interfere with the flow of funds worldwide, financial transactions may begin to move outside of the United States entirely—which could threaten the central role of the us financial system globally, not to mention the effectiveness of our sanctions in the future.”
xxx
xxx
“Merchants and other companies receiving payments should not be able to retain facial image information.
“Financial institutions should also enter agreements with merchants to prevent intermediaries from retaining biometric facial images.
“Consumers should also be allowed to opt-in or decline facial recognition-enabled payments, where other payment options should be available to those who do not give consent.
“According to the guidelines, customer verification should not be solely based on facial prints. Multi-factor authentication should also be introduced for extra security.”
From China publishes face recognition payments guidelines • NFCW inc NFC World:
xxx
There have been a lot of newspaper stories about face recognition recently. It’s an important
“Facial recognition technology used by London’s Metropolitan Police incorrectly identified members of the public in 96 per cent of matches made between 2016 and 2018.”
From “Met police’s facial recognition technology ‘96% inaccurate’ – inews.co.uk”.
xxx
xxx
Brussels and Silicon Valley rarely see eye-to-eye when it comes to technology regulation. But on facial recognition, EU regulators and Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, appear to be moving in the same direction. Mr Pichai this week backed a temporary moratorium on the technology — an option under consideration by EU regulators as part of a broader strategy on artificial intelligence.
From Facial recognition’s risks demand a temporary halt | Financial Times:
xxx
xxx
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
From The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It – The New York Times:
xxx
xxx
A young woman in eastern China found her life turned upside down when plastic surgery altered her appearance so drastically she was banned from online payment gateways and unable to sign in to work. The woman, who was identified only by the pseudonym Huan Huan, told her local television station on the weekend that her troubles had begun a month before when she had cosmetic surgery on her nose. The change in her appearance was too much for China’s widely used facial recognition software, which was no longer able to identify Huan Huan, 21, from Wenzhou in Zhejiang province.
Facial recognition technology in China beaten by a nose job | South China Morning Post:
xxx
xxx
“housands of taxi drivers in the Chinese city of Xi’an are now being verified by facial recognition technology when they get behind the wheel. And, true to the country’s security ethos, they’re also being monitored constantly by an AI system to ensure they aren’t engaging in prohibited activities such as smoking or using a smartphone while driving.”
From “Facial Recognition Verifies Taxi Drivers in China – Mobile ID World”.
xxx
By the way, one area that doesn’t get anything like as much attention as it should is the issue of face recognition but for animals. This, as the Wall St. Journal noted recently, face recognitionactually pretty difficult. As they put it, “It’s not like you can tell a donkey to stand still“. Quite. Nevertheless it can be done. I was privileged to have Dr. Jion Guong Shen from JD Digits, a subsidiary of JD (China’s largest e-commerce business) on my panel about AI ethics and governance at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) 2019. This was a great panel, by the way, largely because the well-informed panellists took the discussion in interesting directions. Anyway JD Digits, amongst other things, runs face recognition services for farmyard animals such as cows and pigs. It turns out that pig face recognition is a big business, There are 700m pigs in China, the productivity gains that farmers can obtain from ensuring that each pig is fed optimally, that sick pigs are kept away from the herd (and so on) are very significant.
IFGS Panel on AI Ethics 2019 (courtesy of Emma Wu).
(Apparently the face recognition system also goes some way to reigning in wannabe Napoleons, as Dr. Shen explained that there are some “bully pigs” that try to obtain a disproportionate share of barnyard resources. The system can spot them chowing down when they shouldn’t be and flag for intervention.)
Which ever way you look at it, Regulators are surely right to focus down on face recognition as being a technology with a social context that we absolutely do not understand.
xxx
“if your service is the kind of service that you would not want children to use in any case, then your focus should be on how you prevent access”
From Watchdog cracks down on tech firms that fail to protect children | Technology | The Guardian:
Which, of course, is easy because of the U.K.’s world-leading digital identity infrastructure.
xxx
“If your service is not aimed at children but is not inappropriate for them to use either, then your focus should be on assessing how appealing your service will be to them.”
From Watchdog cracks down on tech firms that fail to protect children | Technology | The Guardian:
xxx
xxx
Companies that make services likely to be accessed by a child will have to take account of 15 principles designed to ensure their services do not cause harm by default.
From Watchdog cracks down on tech firms that fail to protect children | Technology | The Guardian:
Now, I am not a lawyer so I have literally no idea what any of this means, but I am sure it is meant well. After all, none of us want children to access sites that might causes them harm.
xxx
Today, Open Banking relates only to payment accounts such as current accounts and credit cards. But its central principle — that the data a bank holds on a customer belongs to that customer and not to the bank — could be applied to other products.
In the future, products such as savings, mortgages, insurance and pensions could have their Open Banking moment under the broader banner of “Open Finance”.
Imagine if customers could see all their financial relationships in one place and use that information to make better decisions — automatically seeing what mortgage they could afford, switching to the best value savings account or insurance product, and gaining a holistic perspective on their retirement planning.
From Open Banking can rebalance the market and put consumers in control – CityAM : CityAM:
xxx
xxx
Technological improvements are already making some humans at Deutsche unnecessary.
From How Deutsche Bank’s Technology Eliminates Banking Jobs:
xxx
xxx
The tech giant is creating checkout terminals that could be placed in bricks-and-mortar stores and allow shoppers to link their card information to their hands, according to people familiar with the matter. They could then pay for purchases with their palms, without having to pull out a card or phone.
From Cash, Plastic or Hand? Amazon Envisions Paying With a Wave – WSJ:
xxx
xxx
Employees at Amazon’s New York offices are serving as guinea pigs for the biometric technology, using it at a handful of vending machines to buy such items as sodas, chips, granola bars and phone chargers, according to sources briefed on the plans.
The high-tech sensors are different from fingerprint scanners found on devices like the iPhone and don’t require users to physically touch their hands to the scanning surface.
Instead, they use computer vision and depth geometry to process and identify the shape and size of each hand they scan before charging a credit card on file.
The system, code-named “Orville,” will allow customers with Amazon Prime accounts to scan their hands at the store and link them to their credit or debit card.
xxx
Meanwhile, 16 years ago,
Pay By Touch, San Francisco, announced last week that Piggly Wiggly Carolina had adopted its fingerprint-payment system, which replaces cards and checks with a network that links fingerprint scanners at the point of sale to a database of payment accounts designated by customers.
From Why Piggly Wiggly Went with Biometric Payments – Digital Transactions:
xxx
xxx
Based on positive customer response to a four-store pilot, Piggly Wiggly Carolina here will roll out a biometric point-of-sale payment system to the rest of its 83 company stores by May.
From PIGGLY WIGGLY TO ROLL OUT BIOMETRIC PAYMENT TO 83 STORES:
xxx
xxx
Firms need to take action now as new Fifth Money Laundering Directive rules aimed at tackling money-laundering came into force today (Friday 10 January). These place increased importance on the acceptable use of electronic verification methods in confirming identity, without the need for passports or utility bills.
The Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive – Ready or Not
Consequently all financial services firms, solicitors, accountants, estate agents and now also letting agents not currently using electronic verification, need to re-evaluate their customer due diligence processes. Electronic verification is a far more robust, cost-effective method of Know Your Customer (KYC).
The new regulations recognise the latest technological developments and clearly state that regulated businesses can use electronic verification instead of traditional methods of KYC such as passports, driving licences and utility bills. Since 2004, firms have been able to use electronic verification, but the latest regulations are explicit in that firms can use this method as their sole basis of client verification.From New Fifth Money Laundering Directive rules come into force:
xxx
Snippings