Looks
like Twitter is jealous of Facebook “Buy”
Button and wants to get in on the e-commerce action.
Reports
are now surfacing that suggests that Twitter
has plans for a one-click buy Button of their own as stated in “Twitter
will reportedly roll out 'buy' Button later this year”, published August
22, 2014 2:46 PM PDT by Donna Tam, CNET News
and “Twitter
likely to introduce ‘buy’ Button later this year after partnering with Stripe”,
published August 25, 2014 By Trevor Mogg, DigitalTrends.
This
look like a sure thing, as two months prior on e-commerce website Fancy, Twitter’s “Buy” Button was spotted in the
wild as noted in “Twitter
'Buy now' Button pops up on mobile”, published June 30, 2014 6:10 PM PDT,
by Donna Tam, CNET News.. If Twitter is serious about this, they’ll
basically be going after what appears to be the hottest new trend in
e-commerce; impulsive one-click buying.
The
prime example of this trend of course being the Buy Button now popping up on
Facebook for smartphones as detailed in my blog article entitled “Facebook
kills Gifts and presses Buy Button - How Facebook One-Click Purchases will
start an Apple-esque Smurfberries-style Scandal”.
Other
e-commerce websites are also following suite are Polyvore and most notably
Amazon, which allows you to place orders into your Amazon Shopping cart by
replying to an Amazon Tweet of a product link with the #AmazonCart. There even
a startup named Chirpfy that started in October 2013 that allows you to buy
items that you've spotted on Instagram as described in the article “Chirpify
lets you buy stuff on Instagram”, published October 23, 2012 12:45 AM PDT
by Donna Tam, CNET News.
Social
Media Shopping appears to be taking advantage of the impulsive buying habits of
Credit-Card toting Americans who often desire to purchase what they see posted
on Social Media but have no way to remember what they saw, short of saving the
picture and doing an image search using Google Image.
But
is there a smurfberry-esque Scandal similar to what happened to Apple as
described in as noted in “Apple
to refund at least $32.5M for kids' in-App purchases”, published January
15, 2014 9:24 AM PST by Lance Whitney, CNET
News laying in wait for Twitter and
pals also?
Twitter’s one-click Buy
Button – Confessions of a Shopaholic for smartphones users
This
is especially true if the item popped up in their Social Media feeds, be it Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or other
platforms and they weren’t tech savvy enough to tweet, post or pin it to their
wall for reference later.
The
“Buy” Button on Twitter would allow the
impulsive shopaholic in us all to take advantage of this unscratchable itch to
engage in impulsive shopping that's really a lot easier on a Tablet as
described in my Geezam blog article
entitled “Amazon is
Legally Blonde as the Kindle Fire HD Upgrade is CEO Bezos’s Confessions of an
Online Shopaholic”.
Clearly
this one-click Credit Card purchase options is going to cause problems of
smurfberry-like proportions. If Twitter
ends up doing this as well, they'll be a part of this trend as merchants try to
get Americans into a spending mood before Black Friday and Christmas.
Amazon
has neatly solved this problem by just making a smartphone, the US$199 Amazon
Fire smartphone as explained in my blog article entitled “US$199
Amazon Fire smartphone is Amazon Prime member's Nirvana – Shopping by Nodding
your Head and Finding Waldo” designed specifically for shopping that makes
it as simple as taking a photo of the item you wish to purchase.
This
shouldn't be a difficult with the Apple iPhone 5S or the Samsung Galaxy Alpha
as described in my blog article entitled “Samsung
Galaxy Alpha with Metallic Band - Last of the 5” smartphones with decreased
Battery Life as the Luddite Camp gets Larger”.
But
that’s only gonna protect you if your smartphone gets stolen. What if the thief
is already a trusted member of your App family and already inside of your
smartphone?
One-Click E-Commerce Enemy
- Rogue Apps with keylogging capability a Jamaican Scammers Dream
But
there's another threat that can disrupt these one-click e-commerce
implementations; Apps on the customer's smartphone that steal information from
other Apps as stated in “Sneak
Attack: Android Apps Can Spy on Each Other”, published 21.08.2014 by NBCNews.
This
discovery was based on the research of Qian and Qi Alfred Chen and Z. Morley
Mao of the University of Michigan who had presented their findings at the
USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego on Friday August 22nd 2014.
For those who love reading long Research papers like I do, here's the link to
their paper entitled “Peeking into Your App
Without Actually Seeing It: UI State Inference and Novel Android Attacks”.
Then
again, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone as there are actually Apps that can
be used to deliberately spy on you, as can be seen in the video below.
In
fact, by logic, if any App can access the various functions in your smartphone
then it stands to reason that these Apps can also access data stored in the
Smartphone’ memory by other Apps, even accessing the Cloud Storage platforms
used by those Apps to store confidential data such as your Credit Card
information.
This
is possible because all Apps re allocated sections of the shared memory space
in your smartphones or Tablet's memory. Thus, albeit they're assigned separate
areas or memory within which to work, such Rogue Apps can in fact spy on each
other and read Data from each other’s memory areas.
Data
such as Credit Card information, Login and Passwords can be captured by such
rogue Apps which unsuspecting Americans may have installed on their smartphones
or Tablets.
These
Rogue Apps were the result of legitimate purchases and were purchased from the Apple iTunes Store or even the Google Play Store. Good to note here
that their research points to this vulnerability mainly targeting smartphones
running Google Android and thus mainly purchasing Apps from the Google Play Store.
Sticky Finger Rogue Apps
– Luddite Camp grows as Twitter’s Great Smurfberry Scam unfolds
This
revelation is certain makes one-click e-commerce implementations think twice
and double down on security or at least for Apple and Google to do a more thorough
search of their App Stores to root out Rogue Apps that have sticky fingers.
But
until a definitive way is found to prevent such Apps from stealing Data as if
they were keyloggers as described in my blog article entitled “Professor
Marco Gercke warns of Scammers using Keyloggers for Spear Phishing - How to use
Keyloggers and how to Protect yourself from Scammer's American Hustle for Fast
Cash”, this is going to become a big problem.
Even
more interesting for me personally, the hill in the middle of the Luddite Camp
that I'm sitting on looks to be slowly taking on more refugees! People in
Jamaica, via these articles, are starting to see why I'm not so gung-ho about
smartphones that have that much info stored about me as stated in my blog article entitled “The
Reason why I don't like Smartphones - Location Privacy and How to disable
Location Services on Android and iOS”.
It's
not just the fact that these smartphones can give away your location, but they
can also give away your password, login and your Credit Card information to
unscrupulous criminals via Rogue Apps that read Data from other legitimate Apps,
including Twitter and Facebook!
In
short, Twitter, Facebook and all these One-Click
E-Commerce wannabees have to develope a way to encrypt logins and passwords in
memory. Otherwise we may be witness to the Great Smurfberry Scam in the history
of the US of A since the Great Train Robbery.
Rogue
Apps with keylogging capability may be a Jamaican Scammers Dream that everyone
will wanna get in on as similarly described in my blog article entitled “How
Scammers and Hackers are on the Rebound Laundering Money - Minister of National
Security Peter Bunting misguided on Scammers”.
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