Happy Birthday

Posted on by mrpikes

Author’s Note: After I sent this, I promptly received a call from an intelligent and competent woman who advised me that their ATMs had been told not to wish me a happy birthday anymore. I could not have been happier with how my concerns were addressed.

To Whom It May Concern,

I made an ATM withdrawal yesterday, as I often do. Before I describe what happened, let me say that your ATMs are the best I have used. The ability to select my most common transaction immediately upon keying my PIN is smart user interface design and the machines’ check scanning feature is slick. Good job.

Yesterday while my withdrawal was being processed, the ATM wished me a happy birthday. My reaction, and the reaction from everyone with whom I’ve shared this was, “Well, that’s creepy.”

I do not find it unreasonable that you know my date of birth. I have multiple accounts with you, including my mortgage. I also get that asking for my date of birth is a useful part of verifying my identity when I call.

I have two problems with your ATM wishing me a happy birthday:

1) Again, creepy. It had absolutely nothing to do with the transaction at hand so it felt uncomfortably out of place. Some things just don’t go together, like flying a kite at night or eating a meatball sandwich on the toilet. If the intent behind this was to create a little warmth or goodwill toward your company then it had the opposite effect. You want to generate some goodwill? Have your machine wish me a happy birthday and then slip me an extra 20 bucks.

2) I immediately thought, “What else are they doing with my data? I wonder if they are using it as indiscriminately as they are demonstrating now.” You proved the maxim “Non-existent data cannot be abused. Data that exists will eventually be abused or used for something other than the originally stated purpose for its collection.”

With data that’s just lying around, sometimes the question isn’t “What can I do to leverage this further?” but instead “Do I have the sense not to?”

Ask the bereaved who gets a supermarket mailer addressed to the departed that says, “We haven’t seen you in a while. We’d like you back as a customer.”

Ask the woman who, as a result of her purchasing prenatal vitamins, later receives direct mail offering congratulations and coupons for baby formula…after the miscarriage.

I am interested to know if you had the forethought to create a means for the unamused to opt out of receiving these sorts of messages or if I must simply resign myself to cursing you annually.

Best regards,
MrPikes, Crank

A Win for the Fourth Amendment. Meh.

Posted on by mrpikes

I’ve been yelling at the radio about this more loudly and more often recently, since the press coverage has increased in The Supremes’ current term.

The issue is whether or not it is constitutionally cool for law enforcement to attach a GPS device to a vehicle without a warrant and then surveil that vehicle indefinitely.

It seems like such a softball question. OF COURSE YOU NEED A FUCKING WARRANT! WHAT IN THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?

And this is how my mornings with the radio have gone.

Radio Personality: …argued that no warrant would have been required to follow Antoine Jones using human beings.

Me: 24 HOURS A DAY? FOR A MONTH? HOW MUCH WOULD THAT HAVE COST? AND JUSTIFIED ON WHAT BASIS?

Radio Personality: …arguing that, in instances where law enforcement did not have the requisite probable cause to get a warrant, the GPS surveillance could be used to help obtain that probable cause.

Me: THE SURVEILLANCE IS TO GET THE PROBABLE CAUSE? WHAT THE FUCK? ARE WE LIVING IN RAND MCNALLY, WHERE THEY WEAR HATS ON THEIR FEET AND HAMBURGERS EAT PEOPLE?

Radio Personality: …Dreeben, representing the Department of Justice, cited Katz, the ruling that people have no reasonable expectation to privacy on public roadways.

Me: BUT DUDE, IT’S MY CAR! YOU CAN’T JUST START ATTACHING SHIT TO MY CAR! DO I HAVE NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION THAT YOU WILL NOT ATTACH STUFF TO MY PANTS BECAUSE I BROUGHT THEM WITH ME INTO PUBLIC?

Radio Personality: No.

And so on.

Today, The Supremes ruled unanimously that the installation of GPS devices did, in fact, require a warrant (full opinion, PDF). And they did so in basically the narrowest, most tepid way possible. Justice Scalia, representing the majority, basically said that the act of trespass that occurs in the device’s installation constitutes a “search,” which is why it falls afoul of the Fourth Amendment.

If this ruling were an erection, Scalia would be saying, “This has never happened to me, baby. I guess I shouldn’t have eaten that second piece of pie.”

Justice Alito, in more tumescent counterpoint, wrote:

The court’s reasoning largely disregards what is really important (the use of a GPS for the purpose of long-term tracking) and instead attaches great significance to something that most would view as relatively minor (attaching to the bottom of a car a small, light object that does not interfere in any way with the car’s operation).

And I could not agree with Justice Alito more. While law enforcement attaching stuff to my car pisses me off, the physical surveillance mechanism is the least problematic part of the practice. Alito continues:

“…physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance. With increasing regularity, the Government will be capable of duplicating the monitoring undertaken in this case by enlisting factory- or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones.

Per Justice Scalia, though, spectacularly and willfully kicking the can down the road, “The present case does not require us to answer that question.”

Visa Can Bite My Priceless Bag

Posted on by mrpikes 7 Comments

You may have seen the Visa commercial “Lunch” featuring a highly efficient delicatessen, food literally flying off the grill, and everyone checking out at the register with a Visa check card without even breaking stride – all to the tune Powerhouse.

The whole operation breaks down, the commercial shows us, when some inconsiderate prick uses cash. The music comes to a calamitous halt, food crashes to the floor, people run into one another, and everyone stares at the man like he’s a herpe while the register clerk makes his change.

This is the first ad I’ve seen where cash is made out to be the bad guy, and I yell at the television every time it comes on. See, I love cash. I use it whenever possible and, despite Visa’s depiction to the contrary, my experience is that cash is still superior to electronic debit for retail transactions.

A few properties of cash that I enjoy are:

  1. It is accepted nearly everywhere.
  2. It spends even when the power is out and communications are down.
  3. My experience is that I get through most retail transactions faster than my debit card-wielding counterparts.
  4. The benefits of anonymity extend beyond privacy. Because cash transactions do not couple any of my accounts with my purchases, fewer records exist that are prone to compromise via dumpster diving, dishonest clerks or hacking.
  5. Cash is easily transferable. I can hand my wife a hundred dollars in cash without any intermediary.
  6. Cash can get things done that electronic debit cannot, e.g., slipping the maitre’d a Jackson for better/faster seating. If this is not an issue for you, I suggest that you aren’t living life to its fullest.
  7. Cash is a better deal both for retailers and customers. Retailers pay no fee (typically a flat 7.5 to 10 cents for debit, and up to a usurious 2% for credit), and customers are not at risk of discovering increasingly common point-of-sale fees on their monthly bank statements.

Cash isn’t ideal for everything. I pay all of my bills online, for example, because the benefits of eliminating all that paper (invoices, envelopes, checks) outweigh the costs (persistent records, transaction fees). Privacy doesn’t enter into it because my identity is already coupled to the accounts that I settle electronically.

In addition, cash does not scale well – paying for a car or house in cash is inconvenient and likely to invite scrutiny by our dedicated public servants at the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Homeland Security. And earlier this year, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “..possession of a large amount of cash…is strong evidence that the cash is connected with the drug trade,” and the cash can legally be seized.

With their irritating commercial, Visa is attempting to create a perception that simply doesn’t live up to its claims. I will continue using cash whenever I can, for as long as it’s around, and I recommend anyone consider doing the same. The world will be a slightly cooler place for it.

Sousveillance

Posted on by mrpikes

David Brin opens The Transparent Society by describing two cities of the near future. In City Number One:

Tiny cameras panning left and right, survey traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view…In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image processors to scan for infractions against public order – or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.

Over in City Number Two, there are just as many cameras. However:

These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can use his or her wristwatch television to call up images from any camera in town.

Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.

Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.

A block away, an anxious parent scans the area to find which way her child wandered off.

Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows that the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.

Brin closes the thought experiment by asking his readers, given a choice between living in one or the other city, is there any doubt which one we would choose?

I see strong evidence that we are heading for a hybrid of the two.

Both of Brin’s cities resemble practical implementations of the Panopticon. Since a citizen can never be certain that hus actions are not being monitored, hu must assume that they are. Going the way of City Number One, the UK currently sports a ratio of one CCTV camera to every fourteen people. The propagation of CCTV cameras in the United States is far less dense, but is growing in reaction to the July 7, 2005 London bombings.

City Number Two answers Juvenal’s question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who watches the watchmen? We all do. And camera phones and YouTube are making it possible.

Over the past few months we have seen powerful examples of the potential for Sousveillance. Camera phones captured three separate incidents of excessive force on the part of Los Angeles police. A camera phone made Michael Richards’ hate-filled tantrum available for all the world to see. George Allen’s career in politics is probably over because of a single word, and the video camera that recorded it.

In a short while, only the lowest-end mobile phones will come without the capability of recording video, and Jupiter Research estimates that there are 195 million American mobile phone users today.

That’s a lot of eyes and ears.

I am not wild about the prospect (I’d rather we all just let each other the hell alone), but if we’re going to live in a society where the government and the private sector insist on training cameras on us, I prefer for them to know that we’re Shooting Back.