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Olympic athletes will sport Visa’s new payment ring in Rio

For those making their way to this year’s Olympic games in Rio this August, Visa will be the only card accepted at official venues — a pretty sweet deal for the credit provider. But, rather than be satisfied with exclusive access to the wallets of a half million tourists, the company is using the event to introduce a new ring that will let people pay with a wave of their hand: No phone, wallet or even battery needed.

The unnamed band is pretty simple in design. The interior contains a secure microchip from Gemalto and an embedded antenna; the exterior is simply a black or white ceramic loop. The addition of any kind of decorative metal or dye would interfere with the antenna. It also won’t be custom-fitted but, with 20 sizes available during its trial run, most testers should be able to find a good match. That initial group includes employees and partners, but most notably the 45 athletes sponsored by the payment provider, including swimmer Missy Franklin and fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad.

It was discussions with those Olympians that inspired the creation of the payment ring; wallets and standard wearables can be a real annoyance when you’re constantly changing in and out of uniform. Decathlete Ashton Eaton specifically told Visa he wanted something he could just integrate into his daily routine and forget about. So the ring was designed not only to be inconspicuous, but also be water resistant to 50 meters and never need charging. Instead, the ring draws a tiny bit of power from the payment terminal, just enough to enable the transaction. It doesn’t exchange as much data as Apple Pay or Android Pay, but it’s on par with swiping your card. Visa actually provides a card with the ring, for those instances when contactless pay isn’t available.

Rings have an annoying tendency to go missing, but Visa prepared for that situation too. The payment band can be deactivated from a smartphone, and thieves who find one won’t be able to get anything useful out of it thanks to tokenization. That means sensitive data is replaced by a digital identifier that can be used to process payments, but doesn’t actually contain any personal information.

At this point the ring is merely a prototype and won’t be available to the general public in time for Rio. Instead, the Olympic Village will be a testing ground to find out how well it performs in the field. The band I saw in New York looked and felt great, and the first time I used it on a payment terminal felt magical. I waved my hand and heard that telltale “beep” of a successful transaction.

But I was lucky: Subsequent attempts were hit or miss, and I was told this was a common problem thanks to the diminutive design of the wearable. The ring works best when the full ‘O’ of it is facing toward the terminal; if it’s held at a 90-degree position above the keypad, as it would be when you hold your palm flat, the reader doesn’t pick it up. I found that holding my hand at a 45-degree angle sometimes worked. Visa plans to encourage the athletes to try a different hand position, so don’t be surprised if you see a few of your favorite competitors trying out a “fist tap” the next time they need to pay for a Coke in Rio.

FBI is building a tattoo tracking AI to identify criminals

AI-powered image recognition is all the rage these days, but it could have a sinister side too. Since 2014, the National Institute of Standards and Technology started working with the FBI to develop better automated tattoo recognition tech, according to a study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The idea here is to basically develop profiles of people based on their body art. The EFF says that because tattoos are a form of speech, “any attempt to identify, profile, sort or link people based on their ink raises significant First Amendment questions.”

There are supposedly some some serious ethical concerns at play here. For one, 15,000 images from inmates and folks who’ve been arrested were given to third parties to further test outside algorithms. Many of these tattoos apparently had personally identifying information in the frame along with the ink itself (think: names of loved ones, faces and birthdates). There’s the ethical morass of using prisoners as test subjects at play here, as well.

The trial run was based on 15,000 images (Tatt-C), but the next phase (Tatt-E) will be comprised of over 100,000 photos pulled from Florida, Michigan and Tennessee law enforcement and correctional facilities when it starts this summer. The EFF also says that the NIST has unfairly and inappropriately targeted religious groups as part of their study. Catholic symbology like a cross, Jesus wearing a crown of thorns or praying hands with a rosary are among examples of the religious tattoos under examination.

You might be asking what the difference is here between the algorithm for identifying people is and the books of tattoo photos law enforcement has collected over the years. Well, the gist of it is that the algorithm could be used to automatically associate criminals with a specific tattoo or tattoo pattern as a member of a gang, regardless of context. It might not be 100 percent accurate, but it could connect people (correctly or incorrectly) based on body art.

Unlike the results of a neural net counting calories in food or captioning a photo, if this algorithm gets something wrong it could have dire consequences for people. What’s more, tattoo removal is expensive. A person’s ink they got because they were drunk with coworkers in New York at 4 AM might not represent who they are and what they think currently. For a more famous example, think of Edward Norton’s character from American History X and his Nazi tattoos. Coming out of prison may have changed his extreme ideology, but that giant swastika on his chest was pretty indelible.

The EFF writes that after conversations with the NIST, the government research division will look further into the project, but didn’t say anything about delaying its massive second phase of research.

Source: NIST, EFF (1), (2)