【本课讲解文本和要点】

Your Body Will Soon Be Your Wallet

① Aram Sinnreich recently went grocery shopping at a Whole Foods Market in his hometown of Washington, D.C., and realized he had left his wallet at home. But he had no reason to worry—at least, not about paying for his food. “I used my smartphone to pay, and I unlocked it with my face,” he said.

With in-store facial-recognition machines, he wouldn’t even need his smartphone. Sinnreich, associate professor of communication studies at American University, said he got a glimpse of the future that day. Removing the last physical barrier — smartphones, watches, smart glasses and credit cards — between our bodies and corporate America is the final frontier in mobile payments, he said.

• go grocery shopping

• Whole Foods Market

• smartphone

• unlocked it with my face

• facial-recognition

• associate professor

• got a glimpse of the future

• corporate America

• frontier

• mobile payments

② Biometric mobile wallets — payment technologies using our faces, fingerprints or retinas — already exist. Notable technology companies including Apple and Amazon await a day when a critical mass of consumers is sufficiently comfortable operating without credit cards or cash, according to Sinnreich, author of “The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property.”

• biometric

• notable

• a critical mass of

• intellectual property

③ Facial recognition is already widely used 

A study carried out by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that the number of actual purchases increased by almost one quarter when people used Alipay mobile payments. In dollar terms, they spent 2.4% more than those who did not use them.

One theory: If we don’t handle credit cards or cash, we don’t consider a transaction’s consequences. People who use Amazon’s Echo smart speaker spend 66% more on average at the online retailer than other consumers, according to a survey of 2,000 Amazon customers from Chicago-based research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Of course, people who have the money to buy smart speakers may also have more to spend.

• increase by

• in dollar terms

• transaction’s

• smart speaker

• online retailer

• -based

 ④ Facial recognition has already made its way into financial services. Mastercard and Visa have security features that require people to use their faces to log into their accounts on their phones. Apple’s iPhone X enables people to use “Face ID” to unlock their phones, and Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+ have an iris scanner. Amazon’s Rekognition facial-recognition service can also identify both objects and people.

• make its way into

• security feature

• log into one’s account

• iris scanner

⑤ ‘The neoliberal takeover of the human body’

“Every technological necessity exists in the real world and is used commercially,” Sinnreich said. 

“It just hasn’t all been integrated into one biometric-payment method yet because I would creep people out.” He said it’s Silicon Valley’s endgame: “It’s the neoliberal takeover of the human body.”

Financial-services companies have a vested interest in making sure it’s more difficult to steal their customers’ identities, said Eva Velasquez, CEOof the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization that supports victims of identity theft. “They are deeply incentivized to fight and deter fraud.”

• neoliberal 

• integrate into

• creep sb. out

• endgame

• vested

• steal one’s identities

• identity theft

• be incentivized to

• fraud

⑥ Like all biometric information, however, if lost or stolen, fingerprints can’t be changed like a password. That could cut both ways: They are notoriously difficult to replicate, but it would be bad news for the biometrics industry and consumers if hackers developed the technology to steal a person’s identity by replicating their fingerprints or facial features to buy goods or take out loans in their name.

• biometric information

• cut

• notoriously

• industry

• hacker

• take out loans in their name

⑦ No federal law to regulate biometrics

“There is no generally applicable federal law that regulates the private sector’s collection and use of biometric information in the U.S.,” Hannah Zimmerman, associate attorney with Fey LLC in Leawood, Kan., wrote in a 2018 paper.

Consumer advocates are also worried about biometrics being used for commercial purposes. Three states—Washington, Texas and Illinois—have enacted statutes governing biometric information privacy. Other states have proposed bills for such laws. 

• federal law

• private sector

• associate attorney

• consumer advocate

• commercial purpose

• enacted statute

• governing

• propose bill

⑧ In 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management said the fingerprint data of 5.6 million people was stolen in two separate cyberattacks. It’s not clear when the first attack happened, but it was discovered in March 2014; the second attack occurred in May 2014 and was discovered in April 2015. Officials said at the time that there was no evidence of abuse, but that a counter-intelligence problem could emerge in the future.

• cyberattack

• abuse

• counter-intelligence

Ø MI6: Military Intelligence, Section 6

Ø CIA: Central Intelligence Agency