Apple Inc., it seems, is moving into sweeping up the way we, or at least the smart and affluent we, pay for our goods and services.
 |
| Apple HQ |
Soon the mobile phone - the 'device' - will become not just the all-pervading tool for communicating, for gathering factual information, for publishing our doings to the world, for finding out where we are and where we are going, but for buying everything from coffee to cars. We need take nothing else with us, but we need to have our mobile with us wherever our mobile lives take us, from Iceland's frozen mountains to Afrique's sunny shores.
No more cards: just the phone.
Which sets me wondering - what about those other cards, so far repelled in this country (whatever that means after 18th September) but still lurking in the background? The identity card.
 |
| GCHQ |
Are not our mobile phones making an an increasingly fair bid to becoming our de facto identity cards? Increasingly they contain a vast bulk of our personal information, our personal history and our communications. Our governments already have pretty comprehensive access to them. In their Apple apotheosis they are linked to our persona by our fingerprints and now they are set to become, perhaps, essential to our acquiring our daily bread. What more could our governments ask for?
 |
| Galactic HQ |
Not long ago there was great turmoil here about government proposals to issue what would effectively become a compulsory identity card linked to an extensive database of personal information. After much dispute, between the notions of state encroachment on personal autonomy and privacy, and blandishments of increased social efficiency and 'if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear', the political classes (to whom it appealed across the waning party political spectrum) backed off.
Now it seems, if we have a little patience, Apple will do it for us, as the iphone knows where we are, what we want, how we pay and goodness knows what else besides. Fingerprint technology is about to make it all 'secure' - secure against outsiders doing bad things to us and secure against us doing what we are not meant to do. Glitz it up - that's the message to politicians. Just another piece of out-sourcing (Apple, the greatest corporation in human history since the Holy Roman Empire and twice as holy, is probably better at that than governments).
As politicians increasingly throw in the towel (or their lot) with big corporations (which, of course, have everything to hide and nothing to fear, except from their fellows, and 52 per cent of which according to that tendentious source of conspiracy theory nonsense, the World Bank, conceal the full extent of their income from governments) - and note David Cameron's quiet introduction of ex-investment bankers into government ranks in his recent reshuffle (no wonder he doesn't want to 'reform' the house of lords, that handy back-door - revolving or not - for government recruitment - Lord Green is still lying low in his ermine) ... where was I?
