These are MY TERMS, and other people mean different things by these terms, so I’m going to explain my terms.
Once Upon a Time, R. and I went out to dinner at Bondir in Concord. We had a reservation. We were seated. The server rolled up with a big smile. I was like, do we know her? And she was like, ha ha, there’s a smiley face next to you on the computer. Turns out that restaurants often connect a phone number from a reservation to credit card payment information with the net result that if you are a big tipper, you’ll get better service starting when they have your phone number. This was not the beginning of my journey to massively overtipping on the regular, but it was definitely lit it on fire. Also, weird. I don’t think restaurants invented this system to reward overtipping; I think they invented this system as a side effect of other needs, but if they did invent it to keep tabs (har de har har) on customers, it was more to make sure they remember who they’d already 86’d, more than anything else.
I did not create an account at that restaurant. I don’t have the ability to log into, change the profile, add a profile pic, yada yada yada on the account at that restaurant. (The restaurant hasn’t existed for a long time, which is sad, but such is life.) An account was created for me implicitly by acts like, making a reservation and giving my phone number and paying with a credit card. A walkin who pays with cash probably won’t have an account created for them (altho you never know — there are other ways of identifying someone). Could you have privacy concerns about that? Am I still thinking about how odd that whole experience was, probably more than a decade later? Oh, heck yeah. Not opposed to any of it. Just… noticing.
Explicit account creation we are all familiar with. That’s the kind where they make you pick a password and HOPEFULLY round trip your email (*snarl* at all the ones that don’t) and ask you to add a profile picture and fill in a bunch of demographic information and whatever other crap they decide they want from you. That’s where you go to track your shipments, update your payment information, ask for a refund, etc.
LOTS of things that used to be explicit are now implicit. You go to buy something, and you can pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay or Amazon Pay or wtf (referred to for the balance of this post as *Pay) without setting up an account. This is an increase in convenience, and if you decide you want to access your implicit account, you can generally go set that up and it’ll attach your previous purchases either automatically or you can enter your confirmation number or whatever and it’ll figure it out.
My examples are shopping centric, but this is also true on various discussion sites. Someone sending you an invitation can trigger implicit account creation associated with your email or phone number or whatever, and if you want that account not to exist, you might have to take steps to delete it.
Recently (I think 18.1), Apple added a feature to its phone that causes it to revert to Before First Unlock status (harder to break into) if the phone hasn’t been unlocked in some amount of time. Apple (and other phone makers) are taking theft issues much more seriously, and a side effect (or maybe the other way around) is that it’s tougher for law enforcement to get into a phone that they have physical custody of. That MIGHT relieve some privacy concerns associated with using a device as a dongle or dongle-like item (tap to ride attached to apple pay, rather than using a credit card to tap to ride). But definitely not all of them.
Anyway.
I don’t necessarily spend a lot of time worrying about or being an activist around privacy issues. Like security in general, there’s a balance between access / convenience that is in tension with privacy/security. And I tend towards caring more about whether I can use the thing at all, vs worrying about someone noticing that I did. This is a little bit misrepresentative of how I live my life (understatement), but is a good description of how I think about things. If I’m concerned about someone getting into my stuff or spying on me, I’m going to address that problem directly, and not draw a ton of attention to how. If you think you’re super smarter than I am because you know how ineffective security through obscurity is, well, good for you! You’re super smarter than I can ever hope to be.
What open loop payment systems (some but not all tap to ride systems) and *Pay and similar contribute in terms of convenience is enormous. If you are driving around in your own car, or in a rental car, to avoid the tracking inherent in some public transit payment system, I have some super bad news for you.
One of the things I cannot stop thinking about in this space is whether there’s a way to make buying tickets to an opera or broadway play or a plane ticket “tap to pay”. It wasn’t that long ago that the way you bought tickets to any of these things was by going into or up to an office and paying cash. If you didn’t want to stand in line for the 7:30 pm showing of the new Bond movie, you stopped by the theatre earlier in the day and bought the tickets then. It was a big deal when travel agents could sell plane tickets other than at the airport. Now we live in an absolutely nightmare world in which people shop for tickets months in advance and then engage in advanced maneuvers to try to avoid paying to check their bag or to pay for advance seat selection or whatever. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to navigate the jungle and just pay for everything, but it still requires an intense amount of research just to book a vacation, or an outing for a group to a show or whatever.
Travel agencies (in the past, but even now, albeit in different formats) exist to take high level goals (2 weeks in a tropical location, good beach, fruity cocktails) and turn it into large payment and all the details worked out for you. Saving a bunch of money by doing all that work yourself significantly impacted that business (but did not completely get rid of it). Travel agencies were the high touch / mostly human version of hiding all the inconvenient details behind a simple service face. And in general, the Before Smartphones World was filled with these kinds of services, replaced now by algorithms and monetizable data, instead of humans making phone calls and operating difficult to use early computers and having paper files.
Implicit account creation is what happened when you walked into a business and started asking questions and someone took notes and your business card and/or your phone number and agreed to research the questions and get back to you in the future. And 100% the people talked about you after you walked out of the business, and then when they went home, compared notes with their spouse or friends or whatever. Particularly entertaining people might wind up discussed at church and really entertaining people might become part of a weekly sermon. No wonder we don’t like it in automated form!
But if we can get over ourselves enough to remember that we all forgot all those stories a week later, it does seem like it might be nice to fill out one or a few profiles that capture things like our dietary constraints (OpenTable’s little box that stays filled in), our seating preferences (aisle vs. window, how many rows back from the stage, whatever), our overnight stay preferences (no feather, high or low floor, near / far from elevator) our budget constraints (min / max for meal, per hour of entertainment, per mile of travel, whatever). Better still, if it figured out our constraints over time. Then maybe we could hit the I Am Bored button, and be offered a suggestion for how we could entertain ourselves that we would enjoy, that we could afford, and that we could get to before it starts.
It’s not that I want that, per se. It’s more a matter of, I think it’s possible and it would be very, very, very cool not to have to plan that far ahead all of the time.
ETA: Also, are we going to wash up on the beach of some future in which everyone using cash loaded cards to pay on the public transit are immediately put on the suspect list, because no one else uses cash? That’d be weird.
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