Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Unusable Digital Wallets



I had installed a digital wallet app from a bank a few months ago, but never got around to using it all this time. Every time I tried to use it, I ran into some hitch. Let me mention two.
It is logical that the designer of a digital app should worry about what will happen to the money the customer deposits, in case he drops dead. This wallet had allowed me to go through the registration procedure easily, but woke up suddenly after I had ordered the week’s groceries and tried to pay. It demanded that I nominate someone to receive the proceeds if the inevitable were to occur. Meanwhile another clock was ticking, a man-made one, with 4 minutes or so for the session to be closed. I was supposed to give the nominee’s name and account number. What account it did not say! Is it the wallet account of the nominee, their bank account, customer relation number, etc. By the time I ran around getting the nominee’s bank account number, the 4-minute session was over.
The next morning, I was back at it again. Cautiously I tried to log into the wallet and find out if the nominee I had managed to enter just before my session was cut off had been registered. In the process I had to press “Forgot my pin” or some such button once. My cell phone was immediately taken over by some evil AI. It prepared an SMS, with some some addressee number and filled up the message body with some unreadable “text” that I suspected was some programmer’s code that would have carried out some action somewhere. Because, I was supposed to send it, the responsibility for this action would be mine. Not wanting to be a party to all this, I killed the SMS before it could go out. Was it the digital wallet software that tried to send this unauthorized SMS in my name? I don’t know. The Internet world that allows such stupid practices to be used has to be condemned as a whole.
Don’t they teach students of engineering, web design, computer science or whatever that such short cuts are likely to raise users’ suspicion and irritate them?
Now, you know why they offer big discounts when you use a digital wallet to pay for your bananas!

Srinivasan Ramani