Digital division

by 2 Comments

[Dave Birch] There was yet another debate about the “digital divide” in London, featuring the British government’s technology tzarina, Martha Lane Fox (note for foreign readers: Martha Lane Fox was a co-founder of the famous internet enterprise Lastminute.com), who is charged with forcing a recalcitrant populace — one-sixth of Britons say they don’t want the web — to log on to things. There are 10 million people in Britain who have never been on the Internet and the Digital Inclusion Task Force has to get 4 million of them “online” by 2012, otherwise… Actually, I don’t know what the “otherwise” clause is, so had better move on.

At the debate, they were (essentially) talking about the divide between people who order books online from Amazon and people who don’t, and I’m sure this is an important topic, but I’m not that interested in it. I once got into trouble in a meeting with a public sector customer because I said that people who weren’t on the web generally didn’t want to be, and since they could clearly afford Sky television and mobile phones, I didn’t think that it really mattered that they chose not to buy broadband. But I digress.

Is there an interesting, and more important, digital divide? Yes, there is. And it’s the digital divide between the developed world and the developing world. But it’s not what you think and, as Tomi Ahonen frequently points out, it’s got nothing to do with “one laptop per child” or submarine cables for internet access.

In the Industrialized World we have TVs, PCs, FM radios, fixed landlines and mobile phones to consider and compare and use and more than half of the population has one of each of those. In the Developing World, the only technology that reaches half the population is mobile telecoms, and all others are tiny in comparison. For the Emerging World, mobile is not only the first screen it is literally the only screen.

[From Communities Dominate Brands: The Digital Divide in Numbers: TVs, PCs, Internet users, Mobile around the world]

If we are going to deliver services to the mass of people in the developing world, services that are going to improve the lives of the mass of the population, then we need to focus those services on the mobile channel.

# The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
# The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
# Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

[From Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » Digital Identities and Social Relations]

This seems like a reasonable projection given current trends and a bit of imagination and, personally, I think that the issue of transparency may well have the most impact, changing both businesses and government in ways that we haven’t taken on board yet but that’s an issue for another day. But take these points on board, particularly the reinforcing synergies between the mobile phone as the device, the mobile phone as the tool for opening up organisations and the mobile phone as locus for the voice interface (which, together with voice authentication, will transform identity and authentication).

[Read more...]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Be alert

by 2 Comments

[Dave Birch] Simple text message alerts are an easy way to integrate the mobile phone into the payments environment. A long way away from NFC handsets and such like, but simple and practical and of high utility. If you are walking down the street and you suddenly get a text message telling you that your card has been used to buy a TV in Khazakstan, then you will know much more accurately than any neural network as to whether this is a valid use of your card or not.

Incidentally, in the modern business environment, these services also provide an excellent feedback mechanism. If you know what alerts customers are setting, then you can use that information to tailor better products for them. It’s a simple example, I think, of how a new channel can help customers to design new services on behalf of the business just by providing more interaction (and therefore more information). So if you discover that customers are setting alerts for overseas transactions but not for domestic transactions, then why not sell them a “domestic only” card or whatever.

But back to text. It’s got a lot going for it. It’s ubiquitous, it’s inexpensive, it’s flexible.

, ,

[Read more...]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Trans-mission

by Leave a Comment

[Dave Birch] Should people be allowed to have “anonymous” prepaid mobile phones (well, SIMs) or not? It’s a simple question, but a complicated subject. And it’s worth exploring because it helps us to have a real, focused discussion about practical privacy and security issues. The subject came up because of one of the current hot topics in the UK, which is the government’s proposed “crackdown” (although “crackup” might be a better description) on the authorised copying of copyright material. Once the government has disconnected most broadband users in Britain through the “three accusations and you’re out” policy, many desperate internet addicts will be driven to using mobile connections to continue online banking, reading about “I’m a celebrity get me out of here” behind the Murdoch paywall and playing World of Warcraft. At which point, the mobile operators will come under pressure to start disconnecting people as well. But as the always spot-on mobile industry analyst and Forum friend Dean Bubley notes

“On one hand, the government’s trying to encourage internet connectivity — bridging the digital divide — but a lot of people in lower socioeconomic groups are on prepay, and the vast majority are anonymous,” Bubley said

[From Mobile industry 'cannot identify pirates' - ZDNet.co.uk]

So the mobile operator won’t be able to turn over the name and address of the supposed copyright pyrate. When the letter from Apple Corporation arrives at Vodafone asking them to turn over the name and address of the person who downloaded “Love Me Do”, Vodafone won’t be able to tell them (so presumably Vodafone will then be found in contempt of court or something and their internet access will be turned off).

So what to do? Well, one approach (followed in many countries) is simply to force all prepaid phones to be registered with the authorities. In the UK, the government might use its splendid new national identity register, for example, to ensure that all prepaid phones have a passport or national identity card connected to them them. And, as in Spain, take immediate action against those terrorists, money launderers, child pornographers and criminals who refuse to do so.

Spanish mobile operators last night cut off an estimated three to four million pre-pay mobile phones whose owners had not followed government instructions to register their devices.

[From Spain cuts off 3m pre-pay mobiles • The Register]

I can see exactly why law enforcement and government agencies object so strongly to anonymous mobile phones (although they still allow people to post letters anonymously) but I think they are wrong to react in this way. The truth is, the criminals will just use other peoples’ phones and will be even harder to track and trace than they were before.

Consider the most prosaic of examples. Where I live, in a deprived part of Europe called “Surrey”, a window in the house opposite to ours was smashed by a gang of feral youths. Sadly, we didn’t see this happen so we unable to assist the local constabulary. But suppose I had seen it happen? I have, currently, four prepaid mobile phones about my person (they are used for various demos and experiments for work) so I would have just picked up one of these phones and called the police with the details of the incident and a description of the yobs.

But now suppose that my prepaid phones were now connected to me through the national identity register? Now there’s no chance that I will pick up one of them and report the crime, because I’d be worried that my name and address would get (via the police or the database) to the gang in question.

This may be a silly example, but from battered women to corporate whistleblowers there are plenty of good reasons for allowing anonymity. We need this to be part of the infrastructure.

All this does prove, though, that there is a legitimate place for digital anonymity, and I hope that any identity management system required by the US government and others will allow anonymity and not prevent it.

[From Tech and Law: Technology, domestic violence, anonymity]

Note the important qualification here: there is a legitimate place for “digital anonymity”. I would go further than that and say that without digital anonymity, we are creating the wrong kind of infrastructure for a successful and prosperous society. Now, your web site may choose to allow or decline access by digitally known, pseudonymous or anonymous identities. If you are a web site discussing Iranian democracy, you may well insist on the latter. If you are government department, you may insisit on the former. The infrastructure must cope with both.

[Read more...]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Collision

by Leave a Comment

[Dave Birch] Here at Consult Hyperion we’ve recommended to more than one non-US customer that they look at specifying PIV solutions. Why? Because PIV does almost all of what they want, and the cost and integration advantages make it a better short- to medium-term solution. But there’s another less tangible reason for being interested in it: because once the US government has chosen something as a “standard”, then that is where the energy will go, because the suppliers are rational people. The seal of approval is very, very important. Which is why I”m not the only one who has been reflecting on just how significant the US government’s support for OpenID is. When this support was announced, Bob Blakely highlighted just how important an announcement it was.

But the identity world had its own big news today; the news is that the US Government has teamed up with the OpenID Foundation, the Information Card Foundation, the Kantara Initiative, and InCommon in creating the Open Identity Initiative.

[From Burton Group Identity Blog: US Government Identity News]

I was involved in some discussions with a government department a few months ago — long before the US government announcement — during which I suggested opening up some public services using OpenID. My reasoning was that we could experiment with “soft” OpenIDs provided by (to consumers) familiar services. If you asked a customer to log in to the DVLC using their Facebook “Identity”, then I’m sure they would manage to do this with little training and no mention of trust infrastructures and the like. Once they are comfortable with this, then you can restrict access to “hard” OpenIDs (by which I mean 2FA OpenIDs).

The central point, though, was that the government could help to create an identity infrastructure built on a diverse selection of “private” digital identities. I think that, as Burton note, the US government’s decision signals a genuine paradigm shift in this direction, a genuine change in the mental model are identity.

after years of government attempts to create identities and assign them to citizens (via such bad ideas as the UK National ID scheme and the US REAL-ID act), a government has finally recognized that individuals already HAVE identities, and that it’s a better idea, for most purposes, to use these identities than to establish a new government bureaucracy to create new identities

[From Burton Group Identity Blog: US Government Identity News]

Personally, I think that the government ought to be a “gold standard” identity provider as well as an identity oonsumer, but that’s another issue.

[Read more...]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Support our charities, advertise here

by

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.

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Support our charities, advertise here

by

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.

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.