Biometric technology is convenient, but it comes with some privacy risks, a technology reporter explains to CNBC’s „On the Money.“
Remembering passwords are a pain, and it’s why some people are embracing the convenience of biometric technology. Using a thumbprint to unlock a phone is something people always have on them, and don’t have to remember.
This week, Apple began taking pre-orders for its $1,000 iPhone X. Along with that hefty price tag, customers will face a new unlocking technology that’s raising concerns over security and privacy: Instead of a thumbprint, the iPhone X will take a 3D scan of your face.
Apple claims the facial data will only be stored locally on the phone, and not compiled on company servers. However, that’s not the case with other companies that use similar technology.
One of the largest facial databases in the world is owned by social network giant Facebook. Some 350 million photos are uploaded to its servers every day. And as of June 2017, the social media giant reported it had 2 billion monthly active users.
Right now Facebook is using the technology to detect who’s in your photos. But April Glaser, a technology reporter with Slate, warned that the database could be used in other ways in the future.
„Certainly in a few years, we could imagine a scenario where there’s a camera that knows you walked into a store and somehow that’s married to your Facebook activity,“ Glaser told CNBC’s „On the Money“ in an interview recently.
„They know your emotion or what you just posted. They know you’re having a good day because you shared something happy about your family, and then they’ll be able to market to you perhaps based on that emotion,“ she added.
Glaser said that Facebook in particular has worked on technology that can perceive your emotions based on your face.
Meanwhile, it’s not just the companies that develop this technology, or the advertisers that buy this data that raise concerns. Glaser suggested the public should be concerned about those whose job it is to protect citizens.
„Right now police do need a warrant to unlock your phone or compel you to hand over a password. But it’s still contested whether or not they can force you to put your finger on a touch ID,“ she told CNBC.
„And something that’s way less coercive that forcing someone to put your finger on a touch ID is just simply confiscating the phone and holding it up to your face,“ Glaser added.
She warned that people who are more prone to police searches will need to be careful, and perhaps shouldn’t use this feature.
On the Money airs on CNBC Saturdays at 5:30 am ET, or check listings for air times in local markets.

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Director Roland Emmerich gives a peek at his virtual-reality startup, Vrenetic, which remixes bits of Periscope, Snapchat and Google Cardboard.
Roland Emmerich doesn’t want to direct a virtual-reality experience for you. He wants you to direct VR for everybody.
„I’m too much of a dictator“ to shoot in the immersive format, the „Independence Day“ director said during an interview and demo last week. VR lets viewers decide where their attention should be. „I want to decide where the camera is,“ he said.
So unlike most of his Hollywood brethren, who are venturing into virtual reality by shooting narrative VR experiences, Emmerich is going the route of a startup co-founder, with a mashup of live-streaming, VR and a social network. And as the explosions in his films might suggest, he doesn’t go small: The endgame of his VR company, Vrenetic, is to bring VR to the masses.
Good luck. Virtual reality, which uses headsets to make viewers feel transported into a different world, has been one of technology’s hot trends in the last three years, attracting huge investments by the likes of Facebook, Google, Sony and Samsung. But even those giants have run up against skimpy consumer traction compared with the hype.
And by tackling VR through live-streaming social interaction, Emmerich and his co-founder, movie producer Marco Weber, are going up against some of those heavy hitters at their own game.
Vrenetic’s first foray will be Vresh, a combination of live-streaming social app, plastic VR glasses and 360-degree video camera that attaches to your phone. It takes elements of Google’s Cardboard VR viewer and Twitter’s Periscope live-streaming service and mixes them with some augmented reality too, a la Snapchat’s Lenses.
Founded less than a year ago, Vrenetic (pronounced like „frenetic,“ but with a „v“) plans to release Vresh (pronounced like „fresh,“ but with … you get the idea) to the public in March, after beta tests this year. Its initial run will be 5,000 units of its glasses. Vrenetic plans for the app and the glasses to both be free, and it hopes to build its own 360-degree camera as well.
Roland Emmerich, director of „Independence Day,“ „The Day After Tomorrow,“ and other films, founded Vrenetic with Marco Weber less than a year ago.
The pair demoed an early version of the app and glasses last week to a small number of people.
The Vresh app has two roles. When paired with a 360-video camera, it lets you broadcast live to a single person, like a virtual-reality Skype, or to many, like a Periscope stream. When you slip your phone into a set of plastic VR glasses, the Vresh app also becomes a viewing platform to watch these live streams or prerecorded snippets of 360-degree video, which Emmerich and Weber call „capsules.“
The glasses, made of hard plastic, look like frosted-glass spectacles with antennas sticking out near your cheeks. These protrusions end with viselike blue pads, which grip a smartphone to hold it an inch or so from your face. The glasses stay on your head by temple arms that loop around your ears — you adjust the arms so the glasses are locked tightly from the back of your ears to the bridge of your nose.
While I stood in a stuffy, windowless WeWork conference room with the Vresh plastic glasses clamped to my face, I chatted in 360 degrees with Emmerich, who was in another room down the hall. One of his public-relations reps held the broadcasting phone, selfie style with her arm extended, while its 360-degree camera captured the entire lobby around it, Emmerich and all. He and I traded hellos — I could hear and see him, he could only hear me.
At this early, prerelease stage, Emmerich and Weber are the first to concede both the app and glasses are works in progress.
During my demo, my video exchange with Emmerich had a second or so delay, and it sometimes slipped down to a lower quality to handle the load of all 360 degrees of video in (almost) real time. Whenever I spoke to Emmerich, his live stream also rebroadcast me speaking over speakerphone, so everything I said was repeated back to me on the broadcast. The glasses felt heavy the first time I wore them, with the entire weight of an iPhone resting on the bridge of my nose. When I tried to take them off, their loops behind my ears got caught in my hair.
„Is it as good as an Oculus? No, but it’s good enough“ for something manufactured for $6 or $7 and handed out free, Weber said.
To broadcast, the sliver of consumers who already have 360-degree cameras can use their own gear. But for the rest, Vrenetic aims to eventually release a $20 kit that will include a video-capture device of its own making, plus the glasses. For the demo, Emmerich and Weber broadcast with an Insta360 Nano, a $199 iPhone accessory already available on the market, as an example of how the app could work with existing cameras.
The co-founders are also developing augmented-reality style filters that would overlay on a livestream. In my demo, a simple animation showed an airplane that flew by slowly then lobbed a water balloon at my face. The goal is for features like that to be part of a publishing kit they want to enable users to create their own VR snippets.
The company is exploring making money on Vresh through corporate sponsorships, i.e. Coca-Cola wrapping its logo and colors around Vresh boxes that are handed out at a livestreamed event. Advertising on the app is another possibility.
Most of the elements of Vresh already exist, often from powerful companies. Facebook as well as Google’s YouTube already offer 360-degree video livestreaming for their billions of users. Since 2014, Google’s Cardboard viewer has offered an ultracheap way to turn your phone into a rudimentary virtual-reality machine. And after an initial wave of hype, Snapchat’s Spectacles — glasses that capture video you can overlay with filters — seem to be a flop.
Asked about the possibility that one of those behemoths could snuff out Vresh like Twitter’s Periscope squashed independent livestreaming startup Meerkat in 2015, Emmerich and Weber brushed aside the threat.
„If that happens, it happens. What can we do?“ Weber said. Those would-be competitors could just as well become partners, he said.
Emmerich said the company wants to quickly put its stake in the ground.
„I’m really excited by this, like I am with a film that is a new idea,“ he said. „I had the feeling like [this in] 1995, when I had the idea that I should do this big alien invasion movie. I had a little bit the feeling that this doesn’t exist.“

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Like slimmer bezels, a bigger screen and a November launch date.
Peek-a-boo. This is flagged as being the OnePlus 5T.
Cannibalizing a three-month old phone shouldn’t make sense — except that’s exactly what OnePlus did to last year’s 3, following it up right before the busy holiday spending season with the 3T (OnePlus skipped the 4).
Speculation set in when the OnePlus 5 stock ran dry on OnePlus websites, where the company headquarters its sales. Since then, image leaks and alleged hardware specs have begun bubbling up.
Chinese phonemaker OnePlus has quickly made a name for itself undercutting traditional high-priced, marquee phones from Apple and Samsung with cheaper Android phones that share similar specs and perform just as well. For example, last June’s OnePlus 3 was powerful enough to beat rival phones like the Galaxy S7 and LG G5 in benchmark tests, but at a retail price of $399 it was an absolute bargain.
OnePlus hasn’t made the 5T official; it’s strictly in the rumor zone for now. But the company has a history of releasing teaser posts and videos ahead of an official unveiling. Until we hear what OnePlus has in store for us next, we’ll fill you in on all the 5T gossip.
OnePlus hasn’t copped to the 5T, so there’s obviously no official launch date yet. Speculation of a mid-to-late November window makes sense. Last year’s OnePlus 3T was unveiled on Nov. 15.
Prolific Twitter leaker Evan Blass offered a Nov. 20 release date for a OnePlus 5T with a 18:9 model, or perhaps even after .
Assuming that the 5T is a real thing, it could look like a lot like other flagship phones.
A phone rumored to be the OnePlus 5T popped up on China’s Weibo network.
A couple of pictures claiming to be the 5T popped up on Chinese social network Weibo ( here and here), showing a device with thinner top and bottom bezels. As a result, it seems the fingerprint sensor — which historically lives right below the screen on the 5 — could be moved elsewhere, like to the back of the device.
The upgraded screen would be a welcome addition, considering that the OnePlus 5’s screen isn’t all that different from the 3T. They have the same 1080p resolution and 5.5-inch size.
OnePlus‘ prices have slowly crept up, with the 3 starting at $399 in the US, the 3T at $439 and 5 at $479. So it wouldn’t be unusual for a OnePlus 5T to cost about $500 or even $550. After all, the 128GB storage version of the OnePlus 5 already costs $539.
Oppomart’s unverified listing called the 5T’s starting price at $549. A higher OnePlus price would nevertheless keep pace with skyrocketing smartphone prices. For example, Apple’s iPhone X, which goes on sale Nov. 3, starts at $1,000.
One of the things that made the OnePlus 3T a step up from the 3 was its faster processor. The 3 released with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chip, then the 3T released with the Snapdragon 821, and the 5 with the 835.
The OnePlus 5 doesn’t have either, but most high-end phones are water-resistant and some midrange and entry-level devices are, too. Leaving these trendy features out certainly helps cut costs. On the other hand, waterproofing is especially nudging its way to becoming standard. If the 5T doesn’t have it, it’s a fair bet the OnePlus 6 will.
An endangered species these days, the OnePlus 5T could be one of the few remaining high-end holdouts. Phonemakers cite being able to create thinner phone bodies and support for USB-C as reasons why they let the divisive headphone jack go.
Whether the 5T will happen or not is still to be seen.
An older rumor says that OnePlus may skip the 5T entirely in favor of the OnePlus 6 (but more recent rumors contradict the claim). OnePlus‘ secondary T cycle is a little unpredictable because last year was the first time it happened, but OnePlus‘ annual numbered releases have a little bit more of a track record. This rumor claims that you could still expect OnePlus to release the OnePlus 6 in 2018. If it did, we’d expect a January or March unveiling, which lines up with two major industry trade shows: CES and MWC.
We’ll pile on with more rumors and leaked images as they trickle in.

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The gas battery’s history began with a brief note to chemist and physicist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
Let us start, in the spirit of steampunk, by imagining a new and different past. One that is just a little different to that which we currently have.
So welcome to the year 1867. The Victorian age is at its zenith and a new, powerful and monied middle class is looking for things to do with their cash. Towns and cities seem to be growing bigger with each passing day, and horizons are transformed as new buildings appear everywhere.
One aspect of the urban landscape never changes though. Everywhere you look you will see one of the huge gasometers that have been a constant feature of the cityscape for almost 20 years now. They are filled with the hydrogen gas essential to run the fuel cells – or gas batteries, as the Victorians call them – that are so vital for the economy and for powering everyday life.
In both this imagined and the real past, the gas battery was invented in 1842 by a young Welshman from the then town of Swansea, William Robert Grove. It was a revolutionary device because rather than using expensive chemicals to produce electricity like ordinary batteries, it used common gases – oxygen and hydrogen – instead.
However in this timeline, unlike our own, within 20 years the Welsh man of science’s amazing invention had ushered in a new industrial and cultural revolution.
Our imagined scene is the British Empire’s new electrical age. The horseless carriages that run along roads and railways are all powered by electricity from banks of gas batteries. So is the machinery in the factories and cotton mills that produce the cheap goods which are the source of Britain’s growing wealth. The demand for coal to produce the hydrogen needed to run gas batteries has transformed places such as Grove’s own south Wales, where coalfields are expanded to meet the insatiable need for more power.
Middle-class homes are connected to those gasometers through networks of pipes supplying the hydrogen needed as fuel to run all kinds of handy electrical devices. Machines for washing clothes – and dishes – have trebled the workload of domestic servants by transforming their employers’ expectations concerning daily hygiene. There are machines for cleaning floors and furniture. Electric ovens are fast replacing the traditional kitchen range in the more fashionable houses. Gas batteries also run the magic lanterns that provide entertainment for middle-class families every evening after dinner.
Of course, none of this actually happened. The true history of energy, and the culture that depends on that energy, over the past 150 years or so has been rather different. It was coal and oil, rather than hydrogen, that powered the 19th and 20th-century economies.
The gas battery’s real history begins in October 1842, when Grove, newly appointed professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution, penned a brief note to chemist and physicist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution.
“I have just completed a curious voltaic pile which I think you would like to see,” he wrote. The instrument was “composed of alternate tubs of oxygen and hydrogen through each of which passes platina foil so as to dip into separate vessels of water acidulated with sulphuric acid.”
The effect, as Grove described it to Faraday, was startling: “with 60 of these alternations I get an unpleasant shock and decompose not only iodide of potassium but water so plainly that a continuous stream of thin bubbles ascends from each electrode”. Grove had invented a battery which turned hydrogen and oxygen into electricity and water.
In 1842 Grove was busily making a name for himself in metropolitan scientific circles. He had been born in 1811 into a leading family in the commercial and public life of Swansea, and grew up in a world where the importance and utility of science was commonly understood. The Groves’ neighbours included prominent industrialists including pottery manufacturer and botanist Lewis Weston Dillwyn and John Henry Vivian – an industrialist and politician – who were also fellows at the Royal Society.
Grove studied at Brasenose College Oxford before going to London to prepare for a career in the law. While there he became a member of the Royal Institution and it is clear that from around this time he started to become an active electrical experimenter.
This is when some of Grove’s earliest forays into scientific work began to appear. In 1838 he gave a lecture to the society describing a new battery he had invented: “an economical battery of Mr Grove’s invention, made of alternate plates of iron and thin wood, such as that used by hatters”.
This emphasis on economy was a theme that would recur in his work on the powerful nitric acid battery that he developed a year later – and which led to his aforementioned appointment as professor, and fellowship of the Royal Society – as well as in his work on the gas battery.
Grove described in a letter to Philosophical magazine how the battery “with proper arrangements liberates six cubic inches of mixed gases per minute, heats to a bright red seven inches of platinum wire 1/40th of an inch in diameter, burns with beautiful scintillations needles of a similar diameter, and affects proportionally the magnet”. This is typical of the way battery power was demonstrated. Scientists would show how it could break down water into its constituent gases, make wires glow, or work an electromagnet.
Significantly, Grove also went on to say that as “it seems probable that at no very distant period voltaic electricity may become a useful means of locomotion, the arrangement of batteries so as to produce the greatest power in the smallest space becomes important”. Indeed, shortly after Grove announced his invention, the German-born engineer Moritz Hermann von Jacobi used a bank of Grove’s batteries to power an electromagnetic motor boat on the river Neva in Saint Petersburg. And the technology later went on to be used extensively by the American telegraph industry.
It was Grove’s continuing work on making batteries more efficient and economic that led directly to the gas battery which was to be the forebear of the now modern fuel cell. He wanted to find out just what happened in the process of generating electricity from chemical reactions.
It showed how “gases, in combining and acquiring a liquid form, evolve sufficient force to decompose a similar liquid and cause it to acquire a gaseous form”. To Grove, this was “the most interesting effect of the battery; it exhibits such a beautiful instance of the correlation of natural forces”.
The gas battery provided powerful evidence in favour of the theory Grove had developed regarding the inter-relationship of forces, which he described a few years later in his essay, On the Correlation of Physical Forces. There he argued:
In other words, forces were interchangable and any one of them could be manipulated to generate the others.
But what about utility and practical power? Grove clearly believed, as did many of his contemporaries – including the electro-magnet’s inventor, William Sturgeon – that the future was electrical. It would not be long before electromagnetic engines like the one that Jacobi had used for his boat on the Neva would replace the steam engine. It was just a matter of finding the right and most economic way of producing electricity for the purpose.
As Grove put it to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1866, if:
He was clear that realising this particular dream was not his problem, however: “it seems an over-refined sensibility to occupy ourselves with providing means for our descendants in the tenth generation to warm their dwellings or propel their locomotives”.
Grove certainly made no attempt to turn his gas battery into an economic device, but like many Victorians he was fond of looking into the future and putting his technologies there. In many ways it was Victorians such as Grove who invented the view of the future as a different country that we are so familiar with now. Their future was going to be a country full of new technologies – and electrical technologies in particular.
By the time Grove died in 1896 commentators were prophesying a future where electricity did everything. Electricity would power transport systems. Electricity would grow crops. Electricity would provide entertainment. Electricity would win wars. It seemed almost impossible to talk about electricity at all without invoking the future it would deliver.
All this brings us neatly back to the new past for Grove and the gas battery that our future technologies may deliver. If the future of new and clean electrical technology – that contemporary promoters of the fuel cell are today offering us – really happens, then the obscure story about a curious little invention by a largely forgotten Welsh man of science will become an epic piece of technological history.
That future, if it happens, will change our past. It will change the ways we understand the history of Victorian technology and the ways in which the Victorians used those technologies to tell stories about their future selves. We should not forget that we still pattern our own projected futures in the same way as they did. We extrapolate bits of our contemporary technologies into the future in the same sort of way.
It is interesting to speculate in that case why particular sorts of technologies make for good futures and others apparently do not. At the end of the 19th century the gas battery clearly did not look like a good piece of future making technology to many people. It does now.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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© Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-victorian-lawyer-from-wales-invented-the-hydrogen-fuel-cell/
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