An Apple, but metal and shaped like a credit card
Apple have just announced the release of a bunch of new products, but most interesting of which is the Apple Card. It’s a credit card, made of metal, that shows ONLY your name. What future magic is this? How can it have no information on it besides your name? Let me clear this up, in Apple’s announcement of the card, the fourth word they used was ‘Transparency’. The fifth word they used was ‘Privacy’. I’m trying to find flaws, but it feels like they’re actually trying. Let me break this down:
- Every purchase is authorised by Face ID or Touch ID (because, Apple Pay)
- As well as that, every purchase uses a one-time unique dynamic security code (hence no ccv on the back of the physical card)
- Because of all this, Apple will not be able to tell what you bought, where you bought it, or how much it was
- Someone can steal your card if they want but they just won’t be able to use it.
Hash tag security, guys.
Black Mirror, but without Netflix (because it’s real life)
A kickstarter campaign has just begun for PreShow - an app where you watch 15-20 minutes of ads to get free film tickets. Seems pretty okay but they’ve implemented software that can track your gaze, and therefore the ads will pause when you look away from your phone. Excellent. The good and the bad:
✅ If you can’t normally afford cinema tickets, this could be great
❌ They might charge for the app so it will be like paying to watching ads?
✅ People could find ingenious ways of getting around the gaze-tracking thing.
❌ But really… gaze-tracking software only sounds like a bad thing
✅ The data they collect will all be anonymised
❌ Do not underestimate the power of anonymised data - that can still be used to infer things about you as a user of the app depending on what movies you saw and liked, and what your eyes are doing during certain ads, etc. Ultimately this could be very invasive, but as usual it depends what they decide to do with the data
Google, but in China
Okay so this is what happened with the whole Google being in China thing:
- Google were already there but were kicked out in 2010 because of creative differences (censorship, it was censorship)
- In August last year, it transpired they were working on a China search engine again, and that this was called Project Dragonfly (cool guys, you couldn’t sound more like an evil genius if you tried)
- Dragonfly meetings were all done in secret and the line from upper-management was “nah Dragonfly does not exist”.
- Now, it’s annual peer review time at Google, and Dragonfly has it’s own separate review committee, away from the usual open forum that all other projects do their review in.
- Google CEO has said that he will ““definitely be transparent [about Dragonfly] as we get closer to actually having a plan”.
So, Dragonfly does exist, and Google aren’t worried about censorship anymore. In fact, they’re embracing it (because they want the Chinese government to like them) and they are enabling surveillance on searches, which just sounds fantastic.
Georgia Iacovou
Content Writer