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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Broadband Access: The new Rural Electrification
When I was a teenager in small-town Vermont, my family couldn’t get cable television at home. The technology was around, of course, it just wasn’t profitable for Adelphia to lay so much cable through all that nature for so few customers. Devastating for me at the time, but not, all in all, a big deal. Nowadays, however, there are similar rural communities all over the country that cannot get high-speed Internet connections for the same reasons—and that is a very big deal.
Because we use it as much for entertainment as for vital communication (I do, anyway), it is easy to see Internet access—especially broadband—as a luxury and not a necessity. Perhaps that used to be the case, but times have changed. Broadband is needed in all kinds of ways, just as electricity was needed when the Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936:
- Kids need it. Much as I love Facebook and Hulu, the Internet is about far more than that, even for teenagers. Young people need broadband to study, communicate, and keep up with their connected peers. The later in life you begin to cross the digital divide, the longer the journey is.
- Farmers need it. On a farm, broadband is today what electricity was in 1936. Back then, farmers needed electricity to run new equipment such as threshers and milking machines. Now, they need the Internet to communicate with suppliers and customers, get weather updates and commodities information.
- Everyone else needs it. The way I see it, I wouldn’t have a job without my high-speed connection—I wouldn’t be able to find one! I need broadband to look for work, to keep in touch with networking contacts, and to research companies. My counterpart in a rural community, with dial-up or nothing, is at a definite disadvantage.
For all these reasons, I was glad to see this week that President Obama’s administration announced nearly $795 million in grants and loans for increasing broadband access all over the country, particularly for rural communities.
Obama has made a great start, but this funding comes from the stimulus bill—a one-time infusion of cash. Truly increasing broadband access will require a sustained effort, much like the Rural Electrification Act did. After all, it took us nearly 50 years to provide electricity and telephone service to most farms.
The focus on rural communities also narrows the scope. Broadband needs to be affordable as well as accessible. With an average monthly charge of $39, it’s not always enough to simply have the option there. A sustained effort could expand the scope to help out those families for whom broadband is too costly.
What do you think of expanding broadband access? Do you have a high-speed connection at home? Could you live without it (I couldn’t!)?
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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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Online Behavior of Digital Moms
Razorfish and CafeMom recently teamed up to publish a two-part article that explores the online behaviors of mothers. It’s appropriately titled Digital Mom 2009.This thorough, 30+ page article examines what women with children are up to when they log on. It avoids generalizations and is full of hearty statistics. For example, here is their finding about how mothers with older children are more likely to use Web 2.0 features:
Digital moms of children 12 and older, versus moms with children under 12, are more likely to watch online video (40% vs. 34%), game (57% vs. 51%), read online consumer reviews (38% vs. 30%), and watch or listen to podcasts (13% vs. 9%); while moms of children younger than 12 are more likely to use social networks (67% vs. 62%).
Part 1 focuses on the online behaviors of this growing group. The article’s table of contents summarizes the key findings:
- Digital moms are active users of Web 2.0 technologies.
- Age does matter, both the mom’s age and the child’s.
- Moms’ motivations for using emerging channels change as their children grow.
- “Whom moms communicate with” is changing.
- Moms may be moms, but they are also women with interests beyond parenting.
- Digital Moms first learn about products via many channels.
Part 2 looks at how mothers use social networks to connect, find information, and express themselves online.
Read the full article: Digital Mom 2009
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