GOOGLE KNOWS HOW YOU’RE GOING TO VOTE OR IS YOUR TOASTER SPYING ON YOU?

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As long as I keep people off my computer, there’s no way anyone can find out what sites I visited on the internet. Right? Wrong. Terribly wrong. Google knows how you vote and a lot of other stuff about you.

TOR or The Dark Web

If you plan to do something shady or even illegal on the internet, maybe you should use TOR (The Onion Router). TOR goes through a series of steps before it connects you to that disreputable site. It’s a good way to cover up your tracks. It was used by Ross William Ulbricht, a former eagle scout to set up a black market he called The Silk Road, a black market for illegal products. Before you go the The Silk Road through TOR, though, I should tell you that Ulricht is now a guest at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.

A school administrator in Vancouver used TOR (also called the Dark Web) to look at child porn. Unfortunately for him the FBI are great hackers. They had hacked the porn site and got the email addresses of visitors. With the email address they were able to get the name and address of visitors to the site.

New Technology

As we accept new technology into our lives, we create opportunities for hackers, including law enforcement, to spy on us. Everything from smart TVs to web-connected cars open doors to the secrets we mistakenly think are actually secret. With the Internet of Things we can control lighting, thermostats, door locks, and other things from our smartphone and from a distance. Even toasters can be connected to the internet and sending information (about your toasting habits?) to the cloud. Even some Barbie dolls and baby monitors are connected to the internet. As time goes by, bit by bit, we give up more and more of our privacy.

When you look at those ads online, they’re looking right back at you

Do you remember when you looked up those jogging shoes you were interested in, and later an ad for those shoes popped up when you looked at Facebook on your cell phone? How did they do that? When you looked the shoes on your browser, the site added cookies, invisible little tags that allowed them to follow your activities from site to site, and even from connected device to another, from your laptop to your phone.

These sites not only know that you looked at the page for jogging shoes, they know something about you, like your socio-economic situation, your approximate age, your gender, your health concerns, and your political affiliation.

Just need your phone number

Hackers don’t need a lot of information about you to find out all they want to know. In a recent demonstration in 60 Minutes, armed with just the phone, hackers from Security Research Labs were able to hear and record calls made on the phone, see the contacts on the phone, and get the numbers of every incoming call. They were also able to get the location of the owner of the phone.

Google Knows

Before you read this article, please take this short survey—

Once you take the survey, Google knows a lot about you and not just about the topic of the survey itself. Even if you don’t take the survey, Google can infer a lot about you from your browsing history, things like your age and gender. They can determine your location from your IP address. Using the information they have gleaned, Google can create a representative sample of any demographic group.

You may think that no one is watching, but when you’re on the internet, someone is always watching.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO SWEDEN, DON’T BRING CASH

Most money transfers in Sweden are made with credit cards or smartphone apps. Just 2 percent of the Swedish economy is made with bills and coins, compared with 10 percent in the rest of Europe. Only 20 percent of consumer payments are made with cash. In the rest of the world, 75 percent of such payments are made with cash. More than half of the country’s banks do not carry cash or accept cash deposits! Banks do not want to bother with cash. If there is no cash money in banks, there is no incentive to rob them. Security costs are down in the cashless banks. Furthermore, the banks make money by collecting fees on electronic payments. What is the world coming to?

How do they do it? At lot of museums, visitors must pay for entrance with credit cards or phone apps. Cash is not accepted. Stores of course have been equipped for a while to take electronic payments. But even outside salesmen can do the same. A magazine salesman uses a credit card reader on his phone to take payments. He started this when he realized that fewer people carried cash with them. Since he started using the card reader, his sales have grown by 30 percent.

Instead of dropping a few kronors into the collection box at church, parishioners are paying by cell phone. Churches project their bank account number on a screen so that members can use their phone to make a donation.

Even street vendors have card readers so that customers can pay for their hot dogs with credit cards or phone apps. A lot of Swedes no longer carry cash at all. It makes them feel safer.

There are disadvantages to cashless society. Older people, who are slower to adapt, can feel marginalized. Younger people, who can take out loans through their phones, can get over their heads in debt.  Electronic payments leave trails that the government can follow, so there is a loss of privacy as people pay by card and phone. Even though muggers cannot steal your cash if you don’t have any with you, sophisticated criminals can find ways to steal your money over the internet.

This is what is happening to cash in Sweden, but it is coming here, and faster than you might think. We might as well get ready for it.

(Source New York Times 12/27/2015)

YOU WON'T NEED YOUR WALLET ANYMORE

My parents didn’t trust banks. They remembered the bank holiday of 1933. During the height of the Depression, the federal government closed all banks for eight days to prevent them from going under. The holiday allowed the banking system to stabilize, but it was inconvenient for people who wanted to draw their money out. When my brother and I were teenagers, my parents were saving for something. Instead of putting the money in a bank, they had a jar full of greenbacks on a shelf in the pantry. Eventually they opened a checking account, but they did not have a credit card for a long while, if ever. One time they flew from Florida to New England and tried to rent a car at the airport. They had a lot of trouble with that because they didn’t have any credit cards. Maybe they got one after that. I don’t know.

How times have changed! We’ve gone from cash to charge accounts to credit cards to debit cards to paying for things with a smart phone. The major technology companies are entering consumer banking, especially digital payment apps. Starbucks has been one of the pioneers in this field. Users can get apps for Google Wallet or Square wallet Android or Apple phones. All the customer has to do is hold the phone up to a scanner to pay for their coffee. Dozens of other companies, including Dunkin’ Donuts have smartphone apps. WalMart is getting in line. They have a new payment app that has been available around their headquarters in Arkansas. The company expects it to be available in WalMart stores by the beginning of summer. Their app works by taking a picture of a code on the cash register. The cashier then scans the items through. The charge is then automatically taken from the customer’s account.

Vanessa Montez, a 20-year-old college student in California uses her bank account only for direct deposits for her paycheck from her part-time job and to make debit payments. Instead of a credit cards, she uses an online alternative, Affirm. She can charge things through Affirm and make payments over three to twelve months.

Venmo, a unit of PayPal, is popular with young adults. Some of them have talked their parents into joining Venmo. It is an easy way of sending money. Older adults have not accepted mobile payments as easily as the millennials have, but the tech companies are working on them. 

Major banks are moving into this new technology. Citibank has set up a new unit to deal with the emerging technology. Stephen Bird, a senior Citibank executive said, “The long-range goal is to provide an array of banking and money management services that are as effortless to use as ordering and paying for a ride on Uber.”

What Mr. Bird does not acknowledge is that most people my age, the Over-the-Hill generation, have never used a smartphone to order or pay for a ride on Uber. All this new-fangled stuff seems pretty bewildering to me.

But whether you or I like it or not, big changes are coming to mobile payments, and we’re all going to have to get used to them. We can get a glimpse into our future by looking at Sweden, which has gone to an almost cashless economy. I’ll take a look at that next week. A few people even now in our country no long take a wallet with them. They carry just their driving license and smartphone. If that become common place here during my lifetime, I think, along with my smartphone, I’ll carry a couple of twenties in my shoes, just in case I need them