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If you thought India's decision to ban 86% of its cash was ambitious, wait until you hear what it may do next.
The head of a government-run policy institute said on Thursday that the country could completely eliminate the need for credit cards, debit cards and ATMs in the next three years by switching to biometric payments. Amitabh Kant said that even electronic payment methods may be "totally redundant" by 2020. Instead, all Indians will need for transactions is their thumb or eye.
"Each one of us in India will be a walking ATM," Kant said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. That would represent "the biggest technological leapfrogging ever in the history of mankind," he added.
Arundhati Bhattacharya, head of the State Bank of India, agreed that such a dramatic shift was possible.
"This is something that's eminently doable," she said, pointing out that nearly 1.1 billion of India's 1.3 billion people have already registered their biometric data under the government's unique identification program.
Source: CNN
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MadTinfoilHatter on Monday January 30 2017, @04:20AM
all Indians will need for transactions is their thumb or eye
...and as some have already pointed out biometrics are flawed - they need to be augmented with something - let's say, make it so that all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, receive a cryptographically secured mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they can not buy or sell unless they had the mark.
I for one do in fact not welcome our new book-of-revelation-horrifying-fauna overlords.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @04:49AM
If you actually believe in Revelations you would welcome it. The coming of the Anti-Christ is what causes the second coming of Jesus.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Demena on Monday January 30 2017, @06:23AM
I am sure they will both be as bad as the other. A pity they will not just annihilate each other.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Monday January 30 2017, @02:32PM
You got me thinking. If we already have bio-GUIDs on foreheads and hands, why would it be necessary to have any more tokens imprinted? All I could think of was salt. And I'm not sure how authentication can be performed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @03:12PM
A private key tattoo would make more sense than a fingerprint.
Personally I prefer to keep my private key on a thumb drive on my keychain. I don't see why something like that would be unacceptable to people. Can magnetic strips be dense enough to record a 4096-bit private key? Just put the damned thing on a card. Why is this complicated? Why is it always biometrics?*
Dipshits.
* I can probably answer my own questions with sufficient cynicism. The inability to revoke a fingerprint without some degree of personal injury (can just burn them off instead of cutting a good finger off) plus the inability to generate new ones are the killer features the Masters of the Universe are looking for here. That's why it's always fucking biometrics.
Burn both your hands, both your feet, and gouge both your eyes out if you want privacy in this Brave New World.