Hacker News Reader

Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

Coupling un-alienable, (purposefully) unchangeable biological marks to any account is always horrible idea. And not just the privacy part, for one, it can (only) be unwillingly altered (eg. by an accident), the same way as fingerprints, so a secondary backup code is needed anyway, making the whole setup a bad sort of convenience feature.

The proper solution would be a safe hardware key mechanism.

View on HN

This is an important aspect. People are not aware how big the difference of this is to the usual account name and password. If you want to start over and register a new account, you can have that. Not with this technology. And with the amount of data which Amazon vacuums up, there are totally legitimate reasons for this. Let's say, just as an example, that your girlfriend has bipolar disorder and you order and read a couple of books from Amazon how to cope with that, and how to help her. Fast-forward ten years. She has overcome the illness with good medication, and became your wife, or maybe you have parted ways and live in different states. This is past. But Amazon still has that information about you - a very sensitive kind of information. Maybe if this data is sold to an insurance company, she won't get health insurance. Now, closing your account and starting a new one is an option to handle, even in a limited way, that toxic data waste which is laying around.

Irreversibly tying accounts to biometric identities is a very powerful thing which can easily be abused. Think of Salman Rushdi, the Iranian writer which became target of a religios fatwa and was basically advertised to be murdered. He somehow managed to disappear. But that was years ago. In todays world with Facebook everywhere and your social graph being a different kind of fingerprint, you'd need to axe-murder your whole family and friends to get rid of that social graph which identifies you, whatever name and picture you use. AS no normal human being will do that, it has become basically impossible to disappear. And, having lived in Colombia, South America, I've known many decent and nice people who just had to disappear only in order to protect their life. This is dangerous technology.

Nitpick : Salman Rushdie is Indian

you cannot 'overcome bipolar disorder with medication'

It's a permanent mental illness and cannot be 'cured' or 'overcome'

That's just not true. By definition all our identities are basically linked to a biometric, namely our face.

If you walk into your bank and want to withdraw a large sum from your account, someone at the counter looks at your face and a shitty small photo taken from you either on their system or on your passport to determine if there is a "face match".

A proper technological solution to the current more insecure human verification process of your biometric is only an improvement, not a horrible idea as you suggest.

Banks do that, but retail stores don't… yet. I think we accept a higher bar for authentication and security for a bank than we do for a retail store.

Yea but that was fixed with introducing pin numbers on debit cards. We haven't relied on manual authentication of transactions for decades, thank god.

Also, Amazon (and any involved subcontractors) now have access to your palm, with the possibility of accessing any other system authorized by it.

We tell users not to re-use their passwords, but the same goes for fingerprints too.

You don't need an accident. I was on chemo earlier this year, and I had to re-register my fingerprints both on my phone and on my laptop.

I minorly burned my finger on a toaster oven below my fingerprint line and still had to reregister my finger due to skin growth.

I'm waiting for fake palm gloves. I'm sure such things already exist for finger prints.

And, what also needs to be pointed out: It is, functionally, a user name. Not a password.

Why not offer both?

You can already enter these stores using your phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com