Privacy vs. Convenience: Fingerprinting at the gym
The gym I go to is doing away with membership cards. In many of its gyms nationwide, including all 10 locations in my city, they use biometrics to let you in the door. Instead of swiping a card, you type in a 10-digit identification number and scan the tip of your index finger.
Although privacy advocates have expressed concern at this approach, there has been no major backlash so far against 24 Hour Fitness for using biometrics to identify its customers. The system has been implemented in what seems to be a reasonable and gradual way, and members may continue to use membership cards if they prefer.
Using fingerprints in place of membership cards is convenient, reduces waste, and impedes sneak-ins.
- Convenience. I dress in my exercise clothes to get to the gym, so it’s nice for me to not have to stash a membership card when I often don’t have any pockets. Plus, it’s one fewer item to lose and get charged $25 for, which I’ve done with my workplace badge twice in three years. And after all, convenience is a selling point in a gym—location, hours, parking or bike racks, and classes help us choose the right fitness center.
- Reducing waste. Biometrics are kinder to the environment, as there is no need to print membership cards or use up envelopes mailing them out. With 3 million members nationwide, 24 Hour Fitness alone can eliminate a great deal of wasted paper and plastic—and imagine how much more if other gyms and companies adopt a similar approach.
- Impeding sneak-ins. Without a membership card to beg, borrow, or steal off a friend, it’s hard for a non-member to gain access to a club. It’s awfully difficult to fake a fingerprint.
The downsides of biometrics include identity theft and privacy concerns.
- Identity theft. It is awfully hard to fake a fingerprint. It’s not impossible, however, and once someone has forged your print, it’s probably pretty tough to rectify. You can always get a new membership card. How would you get a new fingerprint?
- Privacy concerns. Officials say that the biometrics system used by 24 Hour Fitness doesn’t store fingerprints in a way that law enforcement personnel could compare to the prints left at a crime scene, but I’m not thoroughly reassured. Since I don’t have a criminal record, my fingerprints aren’t in the possession of the authorities (as far as I know). But now they might be able to track me down through my gym if I decide to pull a big jewelry heist or something.
All in all, I think there’s no reason to be too concerned about scanning in at 24 Hour Fitness. I’m glad I don’t have to tote around a membership card (or worry about losing it), and, for now, I’m not too worried about privacy. As long as we still have the option of saying no, and as long as they’re not selling our fingerprints, this approach raises no big red flags for me. Does your gym or workplace use biometrics? What do you think of it?
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Google and Verizon vs. Net Neutrality
The principle of net neutrality, once it’s codified and enforced, will give us a free and open Internet. Following net neturality’s ideals, a deep-pocketed company can’t pay an ISP to give its site higher priority for access and downloads. Furthermore, an ISP can’t block sites or media that are offensive or owned by a competitor. Everything you can get online, you get can in equal measure.
When Google and Verizon issued a joint statement last week about their shared vision of an open Internet, we all had a collective mini-freakout. It wasn’t the full-throated, unequivocal support for net neutrality that Google has embraced in the past. Instead, it felt more like two companies scheming to get what they want.
Although it received some tepid support, the Google/Verizon proposal has been thoroughly panned by various parties, including the FCC, TechCrunch, and even the New York Times. The critics absolutely have a point, but I think we’ve all gone a bit overboard, possibly because of the sheer scope and reach of Google and Verizon. They’re huge, and they’re everywhere. If they really wanted to, they could probably take over the world. So when they go into cahoots to stray from the no-compromise ideals of net neutrality, we feel insecure. Nevertheless, I think there’s some good and some bad to this proposal.
The good:
- Consumer protection. ISPs would not be allowed to block or purposefully impede traffic regardless of application or service. If this idea had been adopted and enforced years ago, Comcast would never have been able to prevent its users from accessing BitTorrent, an act that resulted in the major net neutrality lawsuit of our time.
- Non-discrimination. ISPs could not discriminate against any traffic or content in a way that harms competition or users. High-roller companies could not pay for their sites to have higher priority.
- Limiting FCC scope. The FCC would enforce—but not create—the laws regulating the Internet. It would take an act of Congress to modify net neutrality rules. Although the FCC has so far been the good guy in all of this, protecting consumers from discriminatory download and access policies, too much power might go to their heads. What if they decide to restrict bad words, like they do with television? I’d never get to do anything online again.
The bad:
- Wireless is exempt. The provisions above apply only to the wired Internet. Wireless is a huge part of the online world, and exempting it undermines the whole idea of an open Internet. Like 56% of Americans, I use wireless Internet regularly, in some form or another. I’m writing this blog post on the free WiFi at my local coffee shop. Later on today, I’ll surely be checking my email on my phone, which is a capability I became addicted to almost instantly after getting my first smartphone. A mobile Internet study released in late 2009 concluded that wireless access is growing faster and will be bigger than the desktop Internet.
- Wireless is exempt!! I just can’t get over this provision. Consider the ability of the wireless to reach folks who don’t otherwise have Internet access. African-Americans, for example, lag behind whites in home-based Internet access, but they’re the most active users of the mobile Internet, with a growth rate nearly twice the national average. If we neglect net neutrality on the wireless Internet, we reinforce the gap between the haves and the have-nots. If you can get a home computer and broadband access, you’ve got a free and open Internet. Otherwise, sorry.
The wireless exemption is huge, but it’s understandable coming from these two companies. Google’s Android marketshare is growing but nowhere near Google’s search engine penetration of 72% in the US. Verizon, meanwhile, still lags behind AT&T among wireless providers. Different rules for wireless might give them an edge. No matter how “non-evil” a company is, we cannot expect that it will operate out of anything other than self-interest. Luckily, their proposal is just a proposal. It will be up to the FCC and Congress to actually set net neutrality rules.
What do you think of the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal?
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The Case for “Normal” Interviews
I hate technical interviews. As part of a job hunt, I hate doing them. As part of my job, I hate conducting them. We can do better, in the technical community, at discovering who is well-suited for roles in our organizations.
A technical interview is an oral exam you can’t really study for. You don’t know what they’re going to ask or what you’re going to remember, but you have to put the answers in full display on the white board. Write out binary search, implement a heap, swap the characters in a string, and don’t forget the semi-colons. Maybe you screw up a solution, maybe you nail it, but either way you move on to the next interviewer and another problem to solve. Five or six such repetitions with different engineers, maybe a hiring manager, and you’re left feeling exhausted and, sometimes, defeated.
Our jobs are nothing like our interviews. What do we learn by subjecting candidates to this process? I’ve never, in my years as an engineer, been compelled to implement a heap in any language—though I’ve had to do it at least twice in interviews. I once interviewed a promising candidate who was dismissed solely because he couldn’t remember how to read a file in C. I’ve also seen candidates hired who were professionally competent but personally, well, unpleasant.
When problems have cropped up with colleagues who ultimately left a company, the issue has never been a lack of technical expertise; it’s always a question of fit or attitude. In my experience, no one minds a co-worker who struggles with a design or piece of code, as long as he or she is willing to ask questions and take suggestions. The ones who fare poorly are the ones who design arrogantly or receive advice belligerently.
We can get a reasonable sense of someone’s technical prowess by asking high-level design questions, asking about previous projects, and even typical-interview questions like how did you overcome a problem. That way, you get some insight into attitude and personality as well as competence. Maybe even ask to see a code sample, which would give you an idea of how an engineer performs with time and consideration, rather than on the fly.
Changing our perspective about interviewing might change our working lives for the better. What do you think of technical interviews?
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Women Leaving Science and Engineering - Tips for balancing work & home life
Last week, Forbes magazine published an article regarding why women leave science and engineering. Among other significant factors, such as pay and promotion disparities, they cite a force in driving women out of the field that really hits home with me: work hours.
We work long hours in science and engineering, no question about that. We work early, late, at home, on the weekends, and on vacation. I’ve worked on planes (Efficient? Yeah, but I’d rather sleep.) and in Vegas hotels. Maybe we don’t work longer or harder than folks in other fields, but we necessarily have state-of-the-art technology and communication tools for our jobs, and we’re expected to use them even in our off hours.
I’m not perfect at balancing work and home, but I’ve learned a few things during my time as a software engineer, both from my own experience and from others’. Here are some ideas:
- Implicitly establish your hours. Set a precedent that you leave at X o’clock every day, and that you are unavailable in the evenings. As long as you’re performing well, your colleagues and boss will get used to your established availability—even in a workplace that values “face time.”
- Explicitly establish your hours. When you’re leaving for vacation, send a note to your colleagues that you’ll be offline during that time. When you’re working closely with a group on a hectic, high-profile project, let them know you’ll answer late-night emails or convene with the group first thing in the morning.
- If you can, shorten your commute. Move closer to work or find a job closer to home. A shorter commute means a shorter, easier day. I myself desperately need to heed this advice, with a San Francisco-to-Silicon Valley journey via bicycle and train that takes nearly 3 hours out of my day.
- Lie a little. Just a little! A tiny fib can make your life a little bit easier—you have plans, you don’t have access to email, whatever. If a half-truth will help you out, you have my permission to lay it on.
- Don’t feel guilty. You’re doing your job, and you’re probably doing it well. The company isn’t going to lose anything if you don’t answer midnight e-mails.
All of these approaches are easier said than done, and all of them
take a bit of chutzpah. But once you get caught in an expectation of
being always-available and putting in over-the-top hours, it’s hard to
break out of it—and that’s when women leave our field for something that seems more appealing.
Why do our hours help drive women out of the field, but not men? It could be that we have an egalitarian situation where both genders work the same number of hours, but it hits women harder. After all, surveys show that we still do twice as much housework as our husbands, a responsibility that makes it tougher to bring work home with us. On the other hand, maybe we have to put in more time than our male colleagues to create the perception that we’re working equally hard.
At my job, I’ve felt it’s a little of both. Sometimes I resolve to go home early, not check in over the weekend, and that always seems to be the day that my boss asks me, “Can you get this done by Monday?” He asks that on Friday. If I follow my own advice, maybe that can change.
Are you always-available when it comes to work? How have you put limits on your time?
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Google’s Economic Impact
No one can deny Google’s tremendous impact on our use of the web and web advertisements. But they got a little carried away recently with a much-circulated report celebrating their economic impact on the U.S. They’ve influenced our economy, to be sure, but the economic impact they celebrated is not down to them alone—they owe a debt to the research behind their pay-per-click algorithm, and much more to the small business owners and entrepreneurs who use Google ads.
Google’s report touts the company’s economic impact on the United States, calculating $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits. They focused on small business growth: entrepreneurs placing ads on Google search results to increase the size and scope of their businesses, and website owners making profits on their own sites with targeted ads.
Google’s AdSense and AdWords employ the pay-per-click concept, originally conceived by Goto.com’s Jeffrey Brewer. Unlike traditional mass media advertising, pay-per-click displays ads that bear some relationship to a query’s words or the search results on the page. Google helped it along, but pay-per-click itself deserves partial credit for changing the online world.
The bigger economic impact, however, belongs to those who place ads with Google and those whose website use ads to generate revenue. It amazes me how business owners, no matter how small the business or remote the location, find a way to keep up with the state of the art. In Google’s report, for example, they estimate $863 million generated for the state of Minnesota, including ad revenue from curbly.com, an online community owned and run by a single employee. Even the tiny Salvadorean bakery in my San Francisco neighborhood, which has awesome pastelitos but no Web site, has a Google ad. These businesses can swing the cost, thanks to pay-per-click, and they reach the customers they’re looking for, thanks to Google. Win-win-win. And delicious.
Have you placed an ad online for your business? Do you have ads placed on your own web site?
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