17 ms·

Mastercard investing in technology to identify commuters by gait, heartbeat

331 points by kick 7y ago

gruez 7y ago
This is just so hilariously absurd. Transit ticketing is a solved problem. You don't need fuzzy gait recognition when a $2 NFC card works 100% of the time.
- muststopmyths 7y ago
  Data Science applications expand to fill the available labor pool, I guess.
  - kohtatsu 7y ago
    Can we have ethics yet?
    - inetknght 7y ago
      Who needs ethics when we've got big business?
  - vsareto 7y ago
    If they need people to work on useless shit for 6 figures, I'm definitely available.
- VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
  640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    I don't understand what you're getting at. It's not just that ticket scanning solves the problem at low scale, it solves it permanently. At the point where the number of passengers on a train/subway scale to the point where it's infeasible to ask each of them to scan a card, it's also scaled to the point where you need to build new trains and more terminals -- at which point scanning paper cards becomes feasible again. I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one. It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better.
    - bigiain 7y ago
      > I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one. When the profit to be made is from ubiquitous surveillance, and doing it for public transport ticketing is just a convenient justification. >It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better. Especially if you want any sort of anonymity/privacy in public...
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      > It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better. Only slightly sarcastically: you’ve got it backwards here. If tickets are better then biometrics that’s why biometrics will win.
    - bitL 7y ago
      > a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one. "How many Amazonian trees are cut for yearly need of tickets in London?"
      - harimau777 7y ago
        Honestly, probably zero. I'd be surprised if many corporations are making paper out of anything other than farm grown softwoods.
      - danShumway 7y ago
        If you're worried about the environment, recyclable paper stubs and small plastic/magnetic strips all seem pretty preferable to building, maintaining, and replacing hundreds or even thousands of high-precision sensors across a city. The power draw from a camera is probably always going to be higher than the power draw from a short-range NFC reader. And the NFC reader is also probably always going to be less delicate and last longer, which is good because the environmental downsides of throwing away paper are negligible compared to the downsides of sticking electronic components in a landfill.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        In most places you get a reusable NFC card.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  It does indicate MasterCard's lack of confidence in smartphone NFC security. I will never enable it because it's too vulnerable to exploitation.
  - gruez 7y ago
    What type of exploit are you talking about? Makes you think wifi/bluetooth/gsm isn't vulnerable as well?
- bigiain 7y ago
  Your mistake here is assuming this has anything to do with transit ticketing... </tin foil hat>
  - 0max 7y ago
    we're in 2020, get a faraday hat for goodness sakes. also, ever notice those new stair gates with the large screen ads on elevated MTA stops lately? wonder what kind of sensors are running in there.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  I went to London recently. The mass transit there supports both an old-fashioned NFC Oyster card and a contactless pay-by-phone option. Culturally, it seems like the whole city is shifting toward the latter option. There's a huge convenience advantage in minimizing the number of objects that you have to carry, retrieve, and put away in your day-to-day life. In China, this trend is even more advanced: payment by facial recognition is widespread there. Is that such a bad thing? Think of how much more fluid life must be without commercial friction.
  - samatman 7y ago
    I already pay by facial recognition: I look at my phone, and then wave it at the kiosk. I would prefer not to replace "something you have and something you are" with just "something you are", I consider that a regression. As an anon on Twitter likes to put it, it's inconvenient to rotate your face after a data breach.
haecceity 7y ago
I was looking into using gait for authenticating users. The false positive and false negative rates were extremely high compared to using fingerprints. Wasn't really viable.
netsharc 7y ago
I was thinking in the context of SARS-CoV-2, in a world where data collectors were trustworthy, it would be useful to be able to track the movements of people. We already carry homing beacons, and technologically there's nothing restricting our phones to record their locations. So a scenario where if someone is sick, everyone who was near them in the last 3-4 days could be notified. Or this traceback could also find the person who infected them and where they did it. Just to make it more accurate, the phones could also be able to scan (e.g. with Bluetooth) which devices are nearby, at any time. It would be technologically awesome, but obviously it's not something I want in the hands of the authorities of today's world. China uses CCTV instead: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-surveillance-idUSKBN2011HO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-surveillance...
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >It would be technologically awesome, but obviously it's not something I want in the hands of the authorities of today's world not only do I not want it in the hands of authorities, I would want it even less in the hands of citizens who will go into paranoid neighbourhood watch mode. The ring doorbell is already the prelude to this. Ubiquitous surveillance by suburban soccermoms is an even more dystopian scenario than the Chinese Communist party
_bxg1 7y ago
I read a (just okay) near-future cyber dystopia novel called "Little Brother" once. It had this interesting segment where gait recognition was being used to track people instead of facial recognition because it was more reliable (I'm not sure whether this is true in reality, but regardless). Anyway. The main character had an easy way of breaking it: toss some gravel in one of your shoes. It'll disrupt your natural walking pattern in a randomized way without you having to even think about it.
- dlsso 7y ago
  Until they isolate the gravel in shoes gait.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Theoretically it would shuffle around and be different sizes each time, so it would never be quite the same. And you could alternate shoes to mix things up a little more. Of course if you're the only one with gravel maybe that would stand out. Which is why we need to get everyone on the same gravel-based onion network :P
    - admiral33 7y ago
      We could make a shoe that shifts water around in the sole over time.
      - djmips 7y ago
        Kind of like active suspension in a car, it would randomize your gait but I suspect it won't be so easy and that a certain arms race of detection vs confounding / mimicking would ensue.
- m463 7y ago
  Was it Little Brother by Cory Doctorow? https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ (he makes most of his books available for free download)
thescriptkiddie 7y ago
It seems like most credit unions issue MasterCard debit cards. Does anyone know how I can get rid of mine and still be able to use ATMs?
- njarboe 7y ago
  My ATM card from a major bank came with MasterCard/Visa attached, but I asked for one without it and they sent me one.
dustinmoris 7y ago
For those who wonder why Mastercard would look at biometric options when we already have things like NFC based payments, here’s a reason: Most payments require at least two factors, e.g. you must be in possession of a card AND know the PIN. Or you must be in possession of a phone AND have it unlocked with your passcode or FaceID, etc. It works well but it’s not perfect. Biometrics like unique vein patterns give you two factors in one. You must be physically present and alive, otherwise your veins would have no blood flowing and there was nothing to capture and secondly your vein pattern must match the “fingerprint” which is you. That’s much stronger authentication than many other schemes and if it was linked to some sort of payment method and potential even identity service then you could not only pay with your biometric but you could also pay for age restricted goods such as alcohol since it would be physically impossible for someone else to use your hand to buy stuff. It’s possible for a kid to use your card and pin or phone and passcode though. So there’s the case for biometrics in the future. EDIT: Also something like a vein driven biometric would also solve the problem of proving that the person was physically at the point of sale and could hugely reduce disputes and fraud. There’s loads of value in these new biometrics if they turn out to work well.
- octocop 7y ago
  Yeah.. It's most definitely to protect their customers from kid-thieves. The biometric data will certainly be used only for authentication and nothing else.
  - dustinmoris 7y ago
    To be fair some biometrics give you the same level of privacy as your bank card. Mastercard doesn’t know any less when you pay by card or NFC. They know where you were, what you buy, how frequently, etc., it doesn’t give them any more or less “tracking” information wether you paid with chip and pin or my scanning your hand. The latter just gives you as a consumer more fraud protection, something which can’t be stolen or forgotten and something which is more convenient. For example you can go to the beach without your wallet. I personally think there is a future in here which is a win for both parties.
SilasX 7y ago
Future Supreme Court ruling: "You have no expectation of privacy in your gait or heartbeat while walking in public."
- quotemstr 7y ago
  > "You have no expectation of privacy in your gait or heartbeat while walking in public." Well, yeah. What would gait privacy even mean? That the law would prohibit you from using your eyes to notice that someone is walking a particular way? That's absurd.
  - harimau777 7y ago
    The issue isn't a given person observing you, it's organized surveillance augmented by technology.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    Okay, my original comment was probably more vague and snarky than HN deserves, so let me elaborate on my thoughts: 1) This will develop to the point that someone sues over this, but gets smacked down because it's based on publicly accessible information. 2) It underscores that current jurisprudence is out of line with our intuitions about what constitutes norm-violating invasions of privacy. 3) Yes, it would be absurd to expect others to shield themselves from noticing your gait. But the problem is, like with all the other things we don't have an expectation of privacy in, it feels a lot more invasive when it's collected by a machine and aggregated in the large and correlated with every other data point about you. Jurisprudence, in America, doesn't seem to have a language for capturing that and so doesn't recognize it. (Heartbeats, for that matter, are something humans don't directly observe by default in normal everyday encounters.)
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    The way you use data is taken in to consideration by the law. If I take a photo outside and you happen to be in it then thats legal. If I follow you around every day with a camera pointed at you then its not legal anymore even though its the same data.
a-wu 7y ago
I use an electric wheelchair. I'd like to see them try to identify me by gait. (yes, I'm likely more identifiable by other means)
orf 7y ago
This is a fluff piece about some project MasterCard has thrown a bit of time and money into. The whole interview could be set up to validate the projects very existence. I remember one a while ago about Microsoft researching if it was possible to measure someone’s level of frustration though their mouse and offer custom help/support wording based in that. Of course gait recognition/biometrics isn’t going to replace ubiquitous NFC payments for transit, just as windows isn’t ever going to tailor its help messages depending on how hard you are gripping the mouse. But sure, invest a bit of time into it, you never know. I believe the term is throw enough shit against a wall and see what sticks?
squarefoot 7y ago
The headline brought visions of a sillywalking John Cleese telling the camera "Identify this!":^)
Zenst 7y ago
Was somewhat curious as to why a credit agency would want to track peoples commutes, though I can see the perspective as to why, it does feel like a solution that fits around privacy upto the point that it works and then becomes part of the privacy debate itself. Though my main train of thought would be - if you sprain an ankle, hand, get a new larger phone etc - this would just compound your bad experiences in life. Though they do say trouble comes in threes, it's not something we should be enforcing by creating issues that would compound such common `edge cases`.
cestith 7y ago
Gait detection for payment is some ableist bullshit. Sprain an ankle? Walk on it, because you can't use the subway. Tear some ligament in your knee? No bus for you. Pull a muscle in your lower back? Sorry, Quasimodo, you're out of luck. Sciatica? Stop trying to steal services, you fraud! At the least, these systems have to be backed by some other system that would need to be kept in place. So maybe just use that for everyone.
- gjs278 7y ago
  lol ok crippy you can keep the backup method, i’ll take this new primary
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  This tech won't be used for payment processing. It will be used for governments to get a decent idea where people are going while being able to track them if they switch to a new card.
quotemstr 7y ago
Measures like this make me think that a lot of modern privacy advocacy is misguided. Each of us is unique in a huge variety of ways. We have unique fingerprints, unique iris patterns, unique genomes, unique gaits, unique writing styles, unique speech patterns, unique hair, unique teeth, unique sweat composition, and even unique coding styles that survive compilation and optimization [1]. What are you going to do --- use a combination of social pressure and regulation to prevent people analyzing any of these things? We're moving toward a world in which you can be identified if you go out of public. Instead of trying to plug an increasingly leaky dike, we should just learn to accept this new future and take advantage of the upsides. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08546 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08546
- harimau777 7y ago
  Personally, I can see several significant downsides (being manipulated by targeted propaganda, punished for socially unpopular behavior, taken advantage of, etc.) and virtually no meaningful upsides.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Personally I think the main issue sociologically is that the implementations are "half-mirror" society instead of fully transparent. The half mirror is inherently abusable. Imagine a sci-fi world where anyone can view anywhere in the past at any time and any depth. It would be disconcerting but it would put people on equal footings and prevent many forms of deception and abuse as well as making criminal trials binary but fair. Corruption would be harder to get away with when every backroom meeting could be audited and verified by everyone. It would force some very uncomfortable questions about social norms and laws as a society in withdrawl from expected hypocrisy. Compare that to one with it just in the hands of authorities to abuse. Obviously not the same but the analogy should be clear how even if both are disliked they are quite different and one is worse.
- eigenhombre 7y ago
  > We're moving toward a world in which you can be identified if you go out of public. ... I think you mean, "We're moving toward a world in which you can be identified by machines if you go out in public." (My friends can identify me pretty easily out there.) We are choosing to move toward that world. We could choose something else. And just because other people are choosing it, doesn't mean you or I have to. Personally I have gotten weary of every single company/organization I deal with collecting more information about me than they need to meet my needs... to such an extent that I now have started looking for opportunities to deny them that information (including simply avoiding them).
mindfulgeek 7y ago
I have no visual memory. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about how I remember people and how they move is a big part of it. I know a man who is very still. Like abnormally still. He was married to a dear friend who passed away and use to regularly visit a place I use to work. I never remembered him. I knew I was supposed to know him but got it wrong every time, until u realized he was really still and when I saw someone who was still, I knew it was him. Not just walk, but breath. I thought it was pretty neat the first time I read about identifying people by their gait.
macawfish 7y ago
I believe that these kinds of applications are central goals of the 5G deployment project. This can already be done with ordinary WiFI hardware. Here is one of multiple papers about it: - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5713643/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5713643/ How much easier will "device free localization and identification" be with 5G's higher frequencies and beamforming antenna arrays? Consider, why else would people be writing papers like these? - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6929065/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6929065/ - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337698696_WiFreeze_Multiresolution_Scalograms_for_Freezing_of_Gait_Detection_in_Parkinson%27s_Leveraging_5G_Spectrum_with_Deep_Learning https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337698696_WiFreeze_... - https://www.5gitaly.eu/2018/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/5G-Italy-White-eBook-5G-Localization.pdf https://www.5gitaly.eu/2018/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/5G-It... - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3324320.3324370 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3324320.3324370 - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7947692 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7947692 I don't like the way 5G is pitched to the public. It feels icky. All the marketing is like "this will change the world and bring internet to rural areas plus you'll be able to watch netflix on your phone omg can you believe that!" But in a few years they'll suddenly be saying "Awe golly shucks whaddya know, who knew 5G radios can also be used to spy on your aging parents breathing habits... how convenient! Now we can send an ambulance before you even call!" etc.
- girishso 7y ago
  That's scary. We're handing over great powers to the governments/corporates, needless to say it will be used against us.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    How quaint. Extrapolate 100 years into the future... we live in a zoo ruled by AI and very few people if anyone in charge. No one can escape or make any meaningful choices of any consequence. Maybe they will partially be in a hive mind and maybe not. And along the way, we were always saying “ooh, this will be used against us someday”. Well of course all this will be built and “used against us”. How you gonna stop progress?
tclancy 7y ago
Hey, I bet this shit will be done exclusively for the good of us their customers!
ficklepickle 7y ago
What a bunch of nonsense. If they cared about fraud, they would have ditched magstripes in the US a long time ago. Good luck using gait recognition on crowds of thousands of people per hour, many being partially occluded, in a reliable manner. I can't see it comparing to RFID cards anytime soon. Best I can tell, current state of the art is still limited to a single individual, in the centre of the frame, in a perfect profile shot. This comes off as a puff piece devoid of any critical thinking.
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  Perhaps they just mean to use it at point-of-sale instances. Instead of entering your PIN, you now have to prance around in front of a camera for 10 seconds. Deploy countermeasures: administer the silly walk!
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badrabbit 7y ago
Simple question: why is this not a crime?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Because the crooks are in charge.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    If it’s legal, then they aren’t crooks.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      What do you call people who rig the system to favor their own interests?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
bitwize 7y ago
Identify -> track. Which means things are going to get very Monty Python when some enterprising Hackernews implements a federated, cloud-based Registry of Silly Walks to help people thwart this system.
LatteLazy 7y ago
I was really disappointed Google glass was cancelled, I wanted a pair to have real life ad blocking...
- JosephRedfern 7y ago
  I hope the irony of this isn't lost!
Scapeghost 7y ago
All this is heading towards a small fraction of the human population controlling and watching everything the rest of us do, with no way for us to do anything against them, and I cannot help but hate the engineers who are helping to make that dystopia happen. Western developers who work for such surveillance tech (and that includes "mere advertisers" like Google and Facebook) should really go get an honest taste of life as an ordinary citizen in authoritarian countries like China or the rich Middle East.
- rvense 7y ago
  I would like to opt out of this, but how? I don't think my life has improved in the least since my bus pass stopped being a piece of paper I replaced every month. Physical cash is a good concept, it works and it would continue to do so until the sun burns out. Even before we get to all the derived socio-political consequences of all of this, it's just not necessary at all.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    I liked when my train started offering digital tickets. I switched to using their app immediately. The first of the month would have very long ticket lines and you would have to arrive early. Not to mention their system always having load issues on the first of the month. Using the app, I could buy my ticket as I sat down on the train.
    - Grimm665 7y ago
      I feel your comment, perhaps inadvertently, really describes the whole issue. Privacy has been traded for convenience, bit by bit, app by app, and very few seem to still care about what has been lost along the way. I include myself in this, I signed up for my auto-renewing subway pass as soon as I could. I worry about this culture of acceptance of convenience over privacy, and I don't feel there is much I can do to stop it even in my own life. All of my friends have Venmo for example; am I going to be the one person they can't easily split bills with? and look like a tin-hatter all the while?
ptah 7y ago
do we need a ministry of funny walks to teach people how to avoid being tracked irl like they are on the web
lowdose 7y ago
Mastercard had an API from which you could get the full postcode of people likely to purchase a luxury item of more than $500 in the next month with 80% certainty. Never got out of alpha and required a deposit of $5000 to use. There needs to be boundaries for companies pursuing profit with immoral activities.

331 points by kick 7y ago

This is just so hilariously absurd. Transit ticketing is a solved problem. You don't need fuzzy gait recognition when a $2 NFC card works 100% of the time.

muststopmyths 7y ago
Data Science applications expand to fill the available labor pool, I guess.
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  Can we have ethics yet?
  - inetknght 7y ago
    Who needs ethics when we've got big business?
- vsareto 7y ago
  If they need people to work on useless shit for 6 figures, I'm definitely available.
VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.
- danShumway 7y ago
  I don't understand what you're getting at. It's not just that ticket scanning solves the problem at low scale, it solves it permanently. At the point where the number of passengers on a train/subway scale to the point where it's infeasible to ask each of them to scan a card, it's also scaled to the point where you need to build new trains and more terminals -- at which point scanning paper cards becomes feasible again. I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one. It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better.
  - bigiain 7y ago
    > I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one. When the profit to be made is from ubiquitous surveillance, and doing it for public transport ticketing is just a convenient justification. >It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better. Especially if you want any sort of anonymity/privacy in public...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    > It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better. Only slightly sarcastically: you’ve got it backwards here. If tickets are better then biometrics that’s why biometrics will win.
  - bitL 7y ago
    > a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one. "How many Amazonian trees are cut for yearly need of tickets in London?"
    - harimau777 7y ago
      Honestly, probably zero. I'd be surprised if many corporations are making paper out of anything other than farm grown softwoods.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      If you're worried about the environment, recyclable paper stubs and small plastic/magnetic strips all seem pretty preferable to building, maintaining, and replacing hundreds or even thousands of high-precision sensors across a city. The power draw from a camera is probably always going to be higher than the power draw from a short-range NFC reader. And the NFC reader is also probably always going to be less delicate and last longer, which is good because the environmental downsides of throwing away paper are negligible compared to the downsides of sticking electronic components in a landfill.
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      In most places you get a reusable NFC card.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
It does indicate MasterCard's lack of confidence in smartphone NFC security. I will never enable it because it's too vulnerable to exploitation.
- gruez 7y ago
  What type of exploit are you talking about? Makes you think wifi/bluetooth/gsm isn't vulnerable as well?
bigiain 7y ago
Your mistake here is assuming this has anything to do with transit ticketing... </tin foil hat>
- 0max 7y ago
  we're in 2020, get a faraday hat for goodness sakes. also, ever notice those new stair gates with the large screen ads on elevated MTA stops lately? wonder what kind of sensors are running in there.
quotemstr 7y ago
I went to London recently. The mass transit there supports both an old-fashioned NFC Oyster card and a contactless pay-by-phone option. Culturally, it seems like the whole city is shifting toward the latter option. There's a huge convenience advantage in minimizing the number of objects that you have to carry, retrieve, and put away in your day-to-day life. In China, this trend is even more advanced: payment by facial recognition is widespread there. Is that such a bad thing? Think of how much more fluid life must be without commercial friction.
- samatman 7y ago
  I already pay by facial recognition: I look at my phone, and then wave it at the kiosk. I would prefer not to replace "something you have and something you are" with just "something you are", I consider that a regression. As an anon on Twitter likes to put it, it's inconvenient to rotate your face after a data breach.

haecceity 7y ago

I was looking into using gait for authenticating users. The false positive and false negative rates were extremely high compared to using fingerprints. Wasn't really viable.

netsharc 7y ago

I was thinking in the context of SARS-CoV-2, in a world where data collectors were trustworthy, it would be useful to be able to track the movements of people. We already carry homing beacons, and technologically there's nothing restricting our phones to record their locations. So a scenario where if someone is sick, everyone who was near them in the last 3-4 days could be notified. Or this traceback could also find the person who infected them and where they did it. Just to make it more accurate, the phones could also be able to scan (e.g. with Bluetooth) which devices are nearby, at any time. It would be technologically awesome, but obviously it's not something I want in the hands of the authorities of today's world. China uses CCTV instead: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-surveillance-idUSKBN2011HO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-surveillance...

Barrin92 7y ago
>It would be technologically awesome, but obviously it's not something I want in the hands of the authorities of today's world not only do I not want it in the hands of authorities, I would want it even less in the hands of citizens who will go into paranoid neighbourhood watch mode. The ring doorbell is already the prelude to this. Ubiquitous surveillance by suburban soccermoms is an even more dystopian scenario than the Chinese Communist party

_bxg1 7y ago

I read a (just okay) near-future cyber dystopia novel called "Little Brother" once. It had this interesting segment where gait recognition was being used to track people instead of facial recognition because it was more reliable (I'm not sure whether this is true in reality, but regardless). Anyway. The main character had an easy way of breaking it: toss some gravel in one of your shoes. It'll disrupt your natural walking pattern in a randomized way without you having to even think about it.

dlsso 7y ago
Until they isolate the gravel in shoes gait.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Theoretically it would shuffle around and be different sizes each time, so it would never be quite the same. And you could alternate shoes to mix things up a little more. Of course if you're the only one with gravel maybe that would stand out. Which is why we need to get everyone on the same gravel-based onion network :P
  - admiral33 7y ago
    We could make a shoe that shifts water around in the sole over time.
    - djmips 7y ago
      Kind of like active suspension in a car, it would randomize your gait but I suspect it won't be so easy and that a certain arms race of detection vs confounding / mimicking would ensue.
m463 7y ago
Was it Little Brother by Cory Doctorow? https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ (he makes most of his books available for free download)

thescriptkiddie 7y ago

It seems like most credit unions issue MasterCard debit cards. Does anyone know how I can get rid of mine and still be able to use ATMs?

njarboe 7y ago
My ATM card from a major bank came with MasterCard/Visa attached, but I asked for one without it and they sent me one.

dustinmoris 7y ago

For those who wonder why Mastercard would look at biometric options when we already have things like NFC based payments, here’s a reason: Most payments require at least two factors, e.g. you must be in possession of a card AND know the PIN. Or you must be in possession of a phone AND have it unlocked with your passcode or FaceID, etc. It works well but it’s not perfect. Biometrics like unique vein patterns give you two factors in one. You must be physically present and alive, otherwise your veins would have no blood flowing and there was nothing to capture and secondly your vein pattern must match the “fingerprint” which is you. That’s much stronger authentication than many other schemes and if it was linked to some sort of payment method and potential even identity service then you could not only pay with your biometric but you could also pay for age restricted goods such as alcohol since it would be physically impossible for someone else to use your hand to buy stuff. It’s possible for a kid to use your card and pin or phone and passcode though. So there’s the case for biometrics in the future. EDIT: Also something like a vein driven biometric would also solve the problem of proving that the person was physically at the point of sale and could hugely reduce disputes and fraud. There’s loads of value in these new biometrics if they turn out to work well.

octocop 7y ago
Yeah.. It's most definitely to protect their customers from kid-thieves. The biometric data will certainly be used only for authentication and nothing else.
- dustinmoris 7y ago
  To be fair some biometrics give you the same level of privacy as your bank card. Mastercard doesn’t know any less when you pay by card or NFC. They know where you were, what you buy, how frequently, etc., it doesn’t give them any more or less “tracking” information wether you paid with chip and pin or my scanning your hand. The latter just gives you as a consumer more fraud protection, something which can’t be stolen or forgotten and something which is more convenient. For example you can go to the beach without your wallet. I personally think there is a future in here which is a win for both parties.

SilasX 7y ago

Future Supreme Court ruling: "You have no expectation of privacy in your gait or heartbeat while walking in public."

quotemstr 7y ago
> "You have no expectation of privacy in your gait or heartbeat while walking in public." Well, yeah. What would gait privacy even mean? That the law would prohibit you from using your eyes to notice that someone is walking a particular way? That's absurd.
- harimau777 7y ago
  The issue isn't a given person observing you, it's organized surveillance augmented by technology.
- SilasX 7y ago
  Okay, my original comment was probably more vague and snarky than HN deserves, so let me elaborate on my thoughts: 1) This will develop to the point that someone sues over this, but gets smacked down because it's based on publicly accessible information. 2) It underscores that current jurisprudence is out of line with our intuitions about what constitutes norm-violating invasions of privacy. 3) Yes, it would be absurd to expect others to shield themselves from noticing your gait. But the problem is, like with all the other things we don't have an expectation of privacy in, it feels a lot more invasive when it's collected by a machine and aggregated in the large and correlated with every other data point about you. Jurisprudence, in America, doesn't seem to have a language for capturing that and so doesn't recognize it. (Heartbeats, for that matter, are something humans don't directly observe by default in normal everyday encounters.)
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  The way you use data is taken in to consideration by the law. If I take a photo outside and you happen to be in it then thats legal. If I follow you around every day with a camera pointed at you then its not legal anymore even though its the same data.

a-wu 7y ago

I use an electric wheelchair. I'd like to see them try to identify me by gait. (yes, I'm likely more identifiable by other means)

orf 7y ago

This is a fluff piece about some project MasterCard has thrown a bit of time and money into. The whole interview could be set up to validate the projects very existence. I remember one a while ago about Microsoft researching if it was possible to measure someone’s level of frustration though their mouse and offer custom help/support wording based in that. Of course gait recognition/biometrics isn’t going to replace ubiquitous NFC payments for transit, just as windows isn’t ever going to tailor its help messages depending on how hard you are gripping the mouse. But sure, invest a bit of time into it, you never know. I believe the term is throw enough shit against a wall and see what sticks?

squarefoot 7y ago

The headline brought visions of a sillywalking John Cleese telling the camera "Identify this!":^)

Zenst 7y ago

Was somewhat curious as to why a credit agency would want to track peoples commutes, though I can see the perspective as to why, it does feel like a solution that fits around privacy upto the point that it works and then becomes part of the privacy debate itself. Though my main train of thought would be - if you sprain an ankle, hand, get a new larger phone etc - this would just compound your bad experiences in life. Though they do say trouble comes in threes, it's not something we should be enforcing by creating issues that would compound such common `edge cases`.

cestith 7y ago

Gait detection for payment is some ableist bullshit. Sprain an ankle? Walk on it, because you can't use the subway. Tear some ligament in your knee? No bus for you. Pull a muscle in your lower back? Sorry, Quasimodo, you're out of luck. Sciatica? Stop trying to steal services, you fraud! At the least, these systems have to be backed by some other system that would need to be kept in place. So maybe just use that for everyone.

gjs278 7y ago
lol ok crippy you can keep the backup method, i’ll take this new primary
Polylactic_acid 7y ago
This tech won't be used for payment processing. It will be used for governments to get a decent idea where people are going while being able to track them if they switch to a new card.

quotemstr 7y ago

Measures like this make me think that a lot of modern privacy advocacy is misguided. Each of us is unique in a huge variety of ways. We have unique fingerprints, unique iris patterns, unique genomes, unique gaits, unique writing styles, unique speech patterns, unique hair, unique teeth, unique sweat composition, and even unique coding styles that survive compilation and optimization [1]. What are you going to do --- use a combination of social pressure and regulation to prevent people analyzing any of these things? We're moving toward a world in which you can be identified if you go out of public. Instead of trying to plug an increasingly leaky dike, we should just learn to accept this new future and take advantage of the upsides. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08546 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08546

harimau777 7y ago
Personally, I can see several significant downsides (being manipulated by targeted propaganda, punished for socially unpopular behavior, taken advantage of, etc.) and virtually no meaningful upsides.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Personally I think the main issue sociologically is that the implementations are "half-mirror" society instead of fully transparent. The half mirror is inherently abusable. Imagine a sci-fi world where anyone can view anywhere in the past at any time and any depth. It would be disconcerting but it would put people on equal footings and prevent many forms of deception and abuse as well as making criminal trials binary but fair. Corruption would be harder to get away with when every backroom meeting could be audited and verified by everyone. It would force some very uncomfortable questions about social norms and laws as a society in withdrawl from expected hypocrisy. Compare that to one with it just in the hands of authorities to abuse. Obviously not the same but the analogy should be clear how even if both are disliked they are quite different and one is worse.
eigenhombre 7y ago
> We're moving toward a world in which you can be identified if you go out of public. ... I think you mean, "We're moving toward a world in which you can be identified by machines if you go out in public." (My friends can identify me pretty easily out there.) We are choosing to move toward that world. We could choose something else. And just because other people are choosing it, doesn't mean you or I have to. Personally I have gotten weary of every single company/organization I deal with collecting more information about me than they need to meet my needs... to such an extent that I now have started looking for opportunities to deny them that information (including simply avoiding them).

mindfulgeek 7y ago

I have no visual memory. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about how I remember people and how they move is a big part of it. I know a man who is very still. Like abnormally still. He was married to a dear friend who passed away and use to regularly visit a place I use to work. I never remembered him. I knew I was supposed to know him but got it wrong every time, until u realized he was really still and when I saw someone who was still, I knew it was him. Not just walk, but breath. I thought it was pretty neat the first time I read about identifying people by their gait.

macawfish 7y ago

I believe that these kinds of applications are central goals of the 5G deployment project. This can already be done with ordinary WiFI hardware. Here is one of multiple papers about it: - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5713643/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5713643/ How much easier will "device free localization and identification" be with 5G's higher frequencies and beamforming antenna arrays? Consider, why else would people be writing papers like these? - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6929065/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6929065/ - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337698696_WiFreeze_Multiresolution_Scalograms_for_Freezing_of_Gait_Detection_in_Parkinson%27s_Leveraging_5G_Spectrum_with_Deep_Learning https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337698696_WiFreeze_... - https://www.5gitaly.eu/2018/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/5G-Italy-White-eBook-5G-Localization.pdf https://www.5gitaly.eu/2018/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/5G-It... - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3324320.3324370 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3324320.3324370 - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7947692 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7947692 I don't like the way 5G is pitched to the public. It feels icky. All the marketing is like "this will change the world and bring internet to rural areas plus you'll be able to watch netflix on your phone omg can you believe that!" But in a few years they'll suddenly be saying "Awe golly shucks whaddya know, who knew 5G radios can also be used to spy on your aging parents breathing habits... how convenient! Now we can send an ambulance before you even call!" etc.

girishso 7y ago
That's scary. We're handing over great powers to the governments/corporates, needless to say it will be used against us.
- EGreg 7y ago
  How quaint. Extrapolate 100 years into the future... we live in a zoo ruled by AI and very few people if anyone in charge. No one can escape or make any meaningful choices of any consequence. Maybe they will partially be in a hive mind and maybe not. And along the way, we were always saying “ooh, this will be used against us someday”. Well of course all this will be built and “used against us”. How you gonna stop progress?

tclancy 7y ago

Hey, I bet this shit will be done exclusively for the good of us their customers!

ficklepickle 7y ago

What a bunch of nonsense. If they cared about fraud, they would have ditched magstripes in the US a long time ago. Good luck using gait recognition on crowds of thousands of people per hour, many being partially occluded, in a reliable manner. I can't see it comparing to RFID cards anytime soon. Best I can tell, current state of the art is still limited to a single individual, in the centre of the frame, in a perfect profile shot. This comes off as a puff piece devoid of any critical thinking.

0xff00ffee 7y ago
Perhaps they just mean to use it at point-of-sale instances. Instead of entering your PIN, you now have to prance around in front of a camera for 10 seconds. Deploy countermeasures: administer the silly walk!

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badrabbit 7y ago

Simple question: why is this not a crime?

anigbrowl 7y ago
Because the crooks are in charge.
- teddyh 7y ago
  If it’s legal, then they aren’t crooks.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    What do you call people who rig the system to favor their own interests?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

bitwize 7y ago

Identify -> track. Which means things are going to get very Monty Python when some enterprising Hackernews implements a federated, cloud-based Registry of Silly Walks to help people thwart this system.

LatteLazy 7y ago

I was really disappointed Google glass was cancelled, I wanted a pair to have real life ad blocking...

JosephRedfern 7y ago
I hope the irony of this isn't lost!

Scapeghost 7y ago

All this is heading towards a small fraction of the human population controlling and watching everything the rest of us do, with no way for us to do anything against them, and I cannot help but hate the engineers who are helping to make that dystopia happen. Western developers who work for such surveillance tech (and that includes "mere advertisers" like Google and Facebook) should really go get an honest taste of life as an ordinary citizen in authoritarian countries like China or the rich Middle East.

rvense 7y ago
I would like to opt out of this, but how? I don't think my life has improved in the least since my bus pass stopped being a piece of paper I replaced every month. Physical cash is a good concept, it works and it would continue to do so until the sun burns out. Even before we get to all the derived socio-political consequences of all of this, it's just not necessary at all.
- sethammons 7y ago
  I liked when my train started offering digital tickets. I switched to using their app immediately. The first of the month would have very long ticket lines and you would have to arrive early. Not to mention their system always having load issues on the first of the month. Using the app, I could buy my ticket as I sat down on the train.
  - Grimm665 7y ago
    I feel your comment, perhaps inadvertently, really describes the whole issue. Privacy has been traded for convenience, bit by bit, app by app, and very few seem to still care about what has been lost along the way. I include myself in this, I signed up for my auto-renewing subway pass as soon as I could. I worry about this culture of acceptance of convenience over privacy, and I don't feel there is much I can do to stop it even in my own life. All of my friends have Venmo for example; am I going to be the one person they can't easily split bills with? and look like a tin-hatter all the while?

ptah 7y ago

do we need a ministry of funny walks to teach people how to avoid being tracked irl like they are on the web

lowdose 7y ago

Mastercard had an API from which you could get the full postcode of people likely to purchase a luxury item of more than $500 in the next month with 80% certainty. Never got out of alpha and required a deposit of $5000 to use. There needs to be boundaries for companies pursuing profit with immoral activities.