The next edition destructively scans your neurons, but pays 20% more. · 9:52pm Jun 16th, 2014
I have what I like to think of as a healthy paranoia when it comes to computers. I don't exactly go around screaming 'The machines will kill us all!', but I've never opened a mysterious mail attachment sent by a Nigerian prince, nor have I ever believed I was the 100,000th visitor to any given website and could thus get a $5,000 gift card just by filling out a special form. I'm... careful. Reasonably so, as much as the nature of the medium will permit.
So. A few days ago, I learned about a new kind of machine which is beginning to spread around the States. It's called an EcoATM, and the purpose of this thing is to buy your old devices (mostly phones and tablets) at what, for the company owner, is a bargain pre-resale rate. For the consumer, it means dumping your out-of-date pieces for less than you could get with any real effort, but at least you don't have to deal with eBay et. all. Basically, as I understood it, you took the piece to the machine, told it what you had, and it would make you an offer on the spot. Damaged items were fine. Broken glass? No problem. If nothing else, I suppose they could always strip out a microgram of gold. They add up, y'know.
I had an old phone hanging around and I was going by a mall which had that machine set up. And honestly, the phone is so old as to be functionally useless. If someone offered me a U.S. quarter for it, morals would dictate that I politely suggest they were about to drastically overpay. But I was curious, and so I dropped in, found the machine, and started with the procedure.
First, it asked for my general category of device. Phone, says I, figuring we'll sort down to the exact model later.
Next, it tells me to see if it has power and that all my personal data has been wiped. Good on both counts.
Then it asked for my driver's license and thumbprint.
This is the point where the procedure pretty much stopped.
I gently inquired as to why the machine needed this, and was informed it was to make sure the phone was in fact mine and not stolen. Plus a human would check the other end of the connection to see if my license picture matched the live one. Because I was being filmed, a detail which had not been mentioned up to that point. Oh, plus thumbprint, which it didn't bother going into.
Okay. Phone theft happens in the States. Phones are expensive little toys, quick to be snatched. Yes, this kind of device could act as a robot fence to the right party. But...
...what is the machine doing?
Is it using my ID to check the phone contract plan of every provider in the United States? How much other information is it asking for?
What happens if I find a broken phone on the side of the road -- which has happened -- and decide to try and get a quarter for it?
How about that thumbprint? While it's in the middle of checking my contract records, is it consulting police databases on the side? I have no warrants or even outstanding traffic tickets, but... those who say the innocent have nothing to fear have never run into a really interesting system error.
Oh, and as long as we're on the topic, this machine is asking for two very major forms of personal identification which will then be stored -- somewhere. Behind some kind of security. When we as a nation have spent the last year hearing news stories on 'This giant store chain was just hacked: fifty ways you are now at risk for identity fraud'. Just how well is this machine protecting the information it takes? Come to think of it, if I really wanted to have fun with ID stealing in that classic supervillain way, I could pay people a few dollars for their personal information while collecting some phones and tablets on the side...
I walked away.
I still have the old phone.
I was initially going to leave it on top of the machine so someone else could get a quarter for it, but I didn't want to be responsible for that person being arrested.
Just do it. It's a completely innocent, honest business. Nothing like that thing with the furbies. I promise.
Smart move. It’s downright depressing just how little people actually care about the sanctity of their personal details, so reading this actually improved my mood somewhat: at least someone gets it.
2211723
And I have your word as a completely honorable supervillain on that?
Everything is broken.
I'm always baffled whenever I remember that "you can't cheat an honest man" used to be an expression people apparently took seriously.
2211757
I think it's 'you can't con an honest man' because the con requires doing something that is close enough to illegal that an honest man would say no.
2211785
Cheat, con, no crucial difference really. It has always been true that anyone can get swindled, sadly.
Also, you have to tell that next edition that yes, you do want to emigrate to Equestria.
In any case, I definitely sympathize with your paranoia. I feel so uncomfortable with giving out my actual name that I don't even have a Facebook. I just don't want everyone on the planet to know what I look like at a moment's notice. Is that so wrong?
Also, I thank vending machines. Just in case.
2211810
Cheat: Using loaded dice or a stacked deck.
Con: Selling you a three story mansion for thirty thousand dollars through some convoluted tomfoolery that is totally not really all that illegal process that you still shouldn't tell anyone about.
Cheating is where the criminal breaks the law, a con is where the victim breaks the law.
Edit: perhaps better would be, a con paves the way for people to give them money, without actually doing anything but making false promises. By making the action seem illegal on the victims part, they ensure that the cops won't be called.
The process of hacking you describe is usually done over the phone and involves the advanced social engineering technique of asking for things in a confident tone of voice.
I never hand someone my debit card if I can't see exactly what they're doing with it (never give one to a waiter, etc), and even then I am paranoid. Too many people have had their checking accounts siphoned by people with card skimmers, and actual money theft is a much harder fraud to recover from than a bad credit card transaction.
I also always use official ATMs, and still look carefully at them to make sure there's no extra hardware added to it to skim off data.
Facebook wanted a pic of my driver's license to re-open my main account, which I stupidly locked. I argued politely with them and eventually told them to close that account and I'd just make another one and never use it. Ironically, they took my word enough to close it, but of course they could not open it even though I definitively proved it was my account without the license.
It really bothers me how much personal data people give away without even thinking about it, and how much our private data is bought and sold without our knowledge.
2211723 I bought and revived a few old Furby's a couple of years ago. I set two of them next to each other and they started having an intense conversation back and forth, which was hugely funny (for a minute). It was probably just a perfectly innocent exchange of outdated nuclear missile silo location info...
As a general rule, never let anyone record your biometrics.
They weren't verifying your identity by asking for all that information. They were building a record for you, so that it would be painless (for them) when they need to fish your data for any patterns that look as though you might, under certain, extreme circumstances consider, at some point, possibly committing a crime or of saying unkind things about your nominally chosen representative or the local constabulary.
2211730 Now, is that the kind of question a friend would ask?
I'm reminded of that old German saying: If you aren't doing anything wrong why do you care if we are watching you?
Whatever company is doing this probably has liability issues to worry about, and given that I'm guessing upwards of a hundred Chinese people have access to scans and copies of my passport I'm not all that impressed by the idea of your driver's license being on file. Hell, I could get behind making fingerprinting as mandatory as registering for Selective Service is for guys. If you have reason to be worried about the government having that information then that's probably a sign that you need to stop doing something. They don't need that shit to hurt you if they decide that's what they want to do.
I don't know what the procedure is in the USA, but if you were to walk into a pawn shop in Australia to sell anything, a valid ID is required.
The thumbprint is very concerning. I'd have walked away at that point too.
If you are concerned about those fractions of a gram of precious metals, or the nasty things the chemicals in the battery might do in landfill, look for an E-waste recycler. I believe most Apple stores run an E-waste program. You won't get any money for your old tech, but you shouldn't be subjected to the Spanish Inquisition either.
That's why I politely hang up on telemarketers.
2211907
Actually, a quick google search suggests that "you can't con an honest man," and "you can't cheat an honest man" are both common versions of the phrase that are used interchangeably. "You can't cheat an honest man" actually gives twice as many results, and is the title of a movie on that theme. The phrase supposedly comes from carnival games, which are, according to your terms, cheats, not cons, so clearly is supposed to be applicable to them. There are also cons that do not ask the victim to be knowingly complicit in dishonest or illegal activity. Cons are designed to be effective at getting money out of gullible people, after all, not to be karmically satisfying
It does seem slightly suspect and there is probably some danger involved with handing out your credentials in that manner, but I've seen that sort of thing before and it seemed fairly legitimate. Hopefully someone can find a less intrusive way to get needed information.
2212548
That might be true, but more likely is that it's a legitimate attempt by someone to use a "foolproof" means of identification, that will, only later, backfire on you in the manner described.
2211729
More like supposed sanctity. It's a nice thought to think that certain details are private, but for them to have any validity somebody else has to know them. Take your social security number for instance. Lots of things legitimately and legally require it, and there has to be some main record somewhere so they can tell that it's really yours and not someone elses. And for a sobering example, I can truthfully tell you that I could have had at least 30 future adult's social security numbers at the grand old age of 8 or so years old because my elementary school provided grades to students (I think they were overall grades), at least in my class and with my teachers, on a wall chart that indexed them by social security numbers (there were names too I think). It's unlikely that the administrators, etc of the school were not implicitly involved. Of course, I only knew that because I was aware of what my own was and the general format of such a number. Undoubtedly such was done in the name of universal ways to identify students. If only smartphones had existed and been in the hands of kids then. I would have had some interesting proof of poor choices.
Given that you have to prove your age using your date of birth and other things and you have to put your name, etc all over the place in paper forms, not only do you hand out quite a bit of information (enough to snoop out more) to other people, you do or have done so on paper which opens it up to anybody's eyes that ever saw that paper...
A quick search on google later:
*http://www.radford.edu/content/registrar/home/about/ferpa-policy/faculty-ferpa.html
Here's betting someone else did that too somewhere...
2213237
Well, I suppose that’s likely, yes. As they say, there’s no need to ascribe malice what can be ascribed stupidity.
2213237
It’s the difference between being sexually active and using a modicum of protection and being sexually active and banging every drug addled crack‐whore you can find in the tri‐state area. Sure, you’re still going to get fucked, but the former is substantially safer than the latter.
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_reuse.png
Though more seriously, if your business requires that level of security from people, you'd better have a better rationale behind it than what this guy does.
I will note that the actual reason for this has nothing to do with checking to see if the phone is stolen. I'd bet that the actual purpose is using your thumbprint + driver's license to check if you have a criminal background and not accept you if you do. Or possibly just storing it to check later on if you were, in fact, a criminal, well after the fact, letting them trace back who stole the phone.
Indeed, it would be an ingenious way of catching electronics thieves - skip all the difficulty in fencing the stuff off and just turn it in to a machine. Machine records you, collects all the data it needs to prove that you are you, and you've already turned in the device which you stole as evidence.
2212817
Aha, this old canard.
There are, in fact, a couple good reasons for this.
1) Shame. Or more precisely, blackmail. Just because something isn't illegal doesn't mean it isn't potentially embarassing - from an adulterous affair to a secret fetish to buying pornography to just doing something which doesn't fit with your public image, all of this can be a huge problem in the wrong hands. Blackmail is very bad if it is applied against politicians (which is why it is important to prevent this - OTHER people being blackmailed can lead to very bad effects for you), and in the wrong hands (mostly not the government's hands, but it will likely end up in other peoples' hands eventually) bad against civilians too.
2) If you do want to keep something a secret, the fact that you took precautions to hide your activity gives away that you were doing something in secret.
Incidentally, fingerprints are actually kind of terrible biometric data. When you watch TV or read about forensic science, people always talk about how awesome fingerprints are. In real life, though, fingerprints actually aren't nearly as good of biometric data as you'd think - even trained fingerprint readers get it wrong alarmingly frequently, and that's ignoring the fact that most of the time, you don't even leave fingerprints behind, or fingerprints are useless because they're in an area where there are too many people - if you're in a public place, oftentimes fingerprints are searching for a needle in a stack of needles. There are definitely times when fingerprints are handy, but in many cases, they're absolutely worthless. Indeed, having a gigantic database of fingerprints is actually probably less useful than having just a database full of fingerprints of felons, strange as that many seem.
The reason for this is that, first off, it is more easily searched, and second off, it helps you narrow your search down more. If you find some guy, and his fingerprints match what are at the crime scene, that's helpful, but having a database full of civilians will likely lead to false positives and not much of value. Felons are more likely to reoffend, and thus looking at them is more likely to yield fewer false positives, but even then...
And that's ignoring other potential issues - for instance, sometimes I get really dry skin on my fingertips, which would lead to extremely weird looking fingerprints which don't much resemble my ordinary ones. Or, you know, people wearing gloves.
I certainly wouldn't use fingerprints for security - a fingerprint is basically like a password, except you can't change it, so if someone else gets it they can use it to access everything and it is impossible to change.
Giving away your thumbprint is probably mostly useless, though. Your driver's license is actually far more problematic - there's not a whole lot that they can do with your thumbprint, but your driver's license has all sorts of data on you.
2213399
I will note that the absolute worst offenders for leaking your personal data are banks; sign up for a bank account (especially a BUSINESS account) and see how much junk mail rolls in. And judging by the junk mail, they give them my approximate income level.
And what on earth would that junk selling business actually attempt to do with your personal details that it in no way needs? Thumb print for fucks sake! Never ever used unless being arrested! Do you really need photo ID to sell an old phone?
2213454
Sad but true. Not that you need have an account with a bank per se; credit unions are a viable alternative and far more trustworthy.