Snippings

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A majority (58%) of Australians are ‘somewhat concerned’ or ‘very concerned’ about biometric data being used to gain access to a licensed pub, club or hotel

From Preventing another Australia Card fail | Australian Strategic Policy Institute | ASPI.

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Checking into hotel in Canberra for Tech in Gov conf identity stream.
Hotel: Do you mind if I take a copy of your driver’s license?
Me: I’d rather you didn’t
Hotel: Okay I’ll just show it to the duty manager then
Me: Great identity story for tomorrow.

— Victoria Richardson (@victoriajane)

August 5, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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North Korea has generated an estimated $2 billion for its weapons of mass destruction programs using “widespread and increasingly sophisticated” cyberattacks to steal from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, according to a confidential U.N. report seen by Reuters on Monday.

From North Korea took $2 billion in cyberattacks to fund weapons program: U.N. report – Reuters.

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The technology is already having an impact in unexpected ways. In April, the transportation payment app Tianfu Tong caused many tech-savvy commuters to be late for work in Chengdu when it stopped generating new QR codes. Commuters were forced to line up at ticketing machines to buy tickets like it was the 20th Century.

From QR code payments make long commutes even longer in China | Abacus.

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But as company vice president Alice Chan told Eater SF, they didn’t found Zippin to squash Amazon Go directly. Instead, they want to sell their technology to potential Amazon Go competitors and spread the wealth.

“We don’t want to be a retailer opening a lot of stores, but our goal is to power other retailers,” Chan explained to Eater SF.

From Another checkout-free store opened in SF. Here’s how it compares to Amazon. – SFGate.

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BMW’s website now reveals that beginning with the 2019 model year, it’s turning the CarPlay interface between iPhones and the vehicle’s infotainment system into a subscription service.

From How BMW’s new annual fee for Apple CarPlay could define the IoT | Network World.

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The UK government’s troubled £154m digital identity project Verify is to be flagged red by Whitehall’s major projects watchdog, meaning delivery looks unachievable

From Red flag: Verify to be marked ‘undeliverable’ by gov projects watchdog • The Register.

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If checkable deposits become central bank liabilities, the loanable funds they provide will no longer be allocated by the competitive private banking system, but rather by the government, which is a recipe for inefficiency and cronyism.

From Efficient “Central Bank Digital Currency” is a Fantasy – Alt-M.

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Aussie CDR

The BIS Annual Review for 2019 touches on this, noting that “Another, newer type of risk is the anticompetitive use of data. Given their scale and technology, big techs have the ability to collect massive amounts of data at near zero cost. This gives rise to “digital monopolies” or “data-opolies”.

The BIS go on to warn that big techs can exploit market domination to engage in price discrimination and extract rents. An example given is that they may use their data to identify the highest prices that customers will pay for different financial services. The concern stems from that fact that price discrimination does not just have distributional effects (ie, raising big techs’ profits at customers’ expense without changing the overall amounts produced and consumed) but could also have adverse economic and welfare effects. 

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The instruments of trade and finance are inventions, in the same way that creations of art and discoveries of science are inventions—products of the human imagination.

From The Invention of Money | The New Yorker.

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But, above all, there will be money to be made from the data generated by all these transactions; after all, data is currency, too.

From Facebook’s Audacious Pitch for a Global Cryptocurrency | The New Yorker.

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