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As big as I am on privacy, I'm inclined to agree with the fine folks over at [H]ard|Ocp:
Who would give up info like their name, age, sex to a beer company for discounts and promotions on beer? Hmmmm, now that I think about it, that's a tough one. Privacy....or....free beer?
Or if, like me, you despise getting your news in video form, techinasia has a story on it as well but in text format:
Enter Glassify. The Tel Aviv-based startup is building 'smart glasses' which pair with an app on your smartphone to offer users incentivized promotions and discounts.
How it works is fairly straightforward. Consumers order their drinks at the bar and are prompted to scan the glasses over their phones when served. The glasses have an NFC chip embedded at the bottom and work with any QR scanner. There's no need to have the Glassify app pre-installed – it'll prompt you to download it when you scan a compatible glass for the first time.
"There's always an incentive for users to scan their glass," explains Ben Biron, CEO of Glassify. "This could be things like a free drink, chaser, or a food combo."
This really shouldn't be that hard of a call but free is my favorite kind of beer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 01 2016, @06:59PM
They could just have the bartender scan the glass before giving it to you. They scan it from their bartender account, it gets 'unlocked'; you scan it with your phone and it locks and can't be scanned until the bartender unlocks it again. You could still scam it a little, but it's gonna take a ton of effort -- you scan all 100 codes and you might get four or five that are open and haven't been redeemed yet. A bot could do it, but you block that by just putting a rate limit on each user. One code per minute isn't a big deal, even if one person at the table is scanning for everyone. But if it's a bot that needs to guess every possible code before those beers get scanned by someone else, that'll get blocked entirely, even with only 100 glasses that's going to take 2 hours, and the glass won't be active that long. If you rate limit by IP address then a botnet would work, but that's idiotic -- just rate limit by user account, and no transfers between accounts. So to use a botnet all your rewards end up distributed between a few hundred different accounts, and surely those rewards expire, so the odds of building up enough in one account to be able to use them before they expire is pretty slim. Tie in the bartender account to the POS system, so if you scan glasses that went to two separate tables, you get locked out for cheating. Add GPS fencing to the scanner app, so you can't scan codes if you aren't actually at the bar.
If they've done NOTHING to prevent this sort of issue, they deserve whatever consequences they get (which is probably not much really). But it seems like it would be pretty trivial to prevent false scans because you already know within a few minutes and a few feet when and where that code could be legitimately scanned. And those scans must be tied to a registered account on an external service.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:52PM
Yeah you list some valid defenses. The news seems to imply people without the app can scan and get some kind of offer, if that reply indicates valid code or not, well...
It smells kinda startup-py and those kids usually don't know anything about security or business. I wrapped someone elses idea in bootstrap wheres the billion bucks I am entitled to, etc.
Most bar and restaurant operate on hype (which this might help) and razor thin margins (not so good).
Its wait and see time...