1234 is my regular PIN. 1235 is my help I'm being robbed PIN -- it dispenses the cash, calls the cops, and tags the video.
In the scenario that you're proposing, the only advantage is that police are called about 30 seconds sooner. But my guess is that in the vast majority of cities in the US, that 30 seconds won't be enough to catch the criminals.
Not to mention that if this became widespread (and therefore known) you've now given the victim a crude weapon that the robber may feel warrants more violence to convince the victim that they better not type in their duress code.
Unless the thief takes off with the victims phone as well. Additionally there are sadly instances where the theft at the ATM is just the start of other crimes towards the victim.
Why not just have e.g. "swipe left to unlock to guest mode" or something similar? Then you can still have it be locked, but with the same old PIN; it will be far more attractive to users.
Will people pay a premium for it (compared to say, offering more air miles)?
I'd be willing to bet that for most people it simply isn't worth the investment for them.
I would tend to guess it would cause more problems than it solves.
Edit: Somewhat replying to a sibling comment. In countries with less effective police, they originally put withdrawal limits on the cards, but this just caused muggers to hold their victims until the victim's account was drained.
Further Edit: I couldn't find any online sources for this information, so I could be remembering incorrectly.
Diebold ATMs could be configured to send a "distress signal" when their safe was opened and the last number of the combination lock was off by 1. The option was off by default, because it required additional hardware hook-up (for the signaling), but it was there.
According to him, this is a feature that pops up once in awhile, but they have a long list of stuff to do and this is just one of those things that always gets bumped out.
From my perspective as a platform dev, I'd like to get into some of the technical problems with changing this, but I could end up breaking some NDAs or something. I'll just say, when you start mucking around with adding login code, file system changes, and the current dmcrypt encryption, you hit lots of fun design problems.
Single user login is a design problem! When I hand my tablet off to someone they have access to my gmail, gtalk, facebook, twitter, imap email, browser sessions and dropbox.
And that's just what I can recall on the fly.
That's the first thing I wondered about when Apple released the ipad: from the start, this looked like a family/eminently shareable device (and within a month you had reports of it being used as a shared family device, picked and left on the living room table for quick sessions of browsing or game), it felt weird that all the tablets were single-user, and the more time passes the weirder it is.
It's not full user accounts, but a multi-user web browser. You can protect your bookmarks, logins & web history and it also has a guest mode.
Once you start adding stuff like login systems, seperate file permissions you start becoming a PC with a touchscreen.
Because dealing with multiple profiles and/or different profile types is a fucking huge giant pain the ass and a monumental amount of work! Xbox has local, guest, live silver, and live gold accounts. Dealing with all the different profiles and switching between is a nightmare. Urgh, no thanks.
Operating systems have had user switching for years. But I'll bet only a small minority of Mac users even know this is possible, and even fewer have ever used it.
Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted instantaneous user switching? That's a smidgen harder than the 40-year-old solutions :)
It's for different people, not for you that an account should be created. I also would like that in all the *pads. I'd like to split the history and logins of each person using my touchpad. It's a mess when 2+ people start using it.
My girlfriend texting me about medical issues isn't "weird", but I still don't want my mom to read it if I happen to hand him my phone for a few minutes.
My mom emailing me photos of my childhood self taking a bath isn't weird, but I wouldn't want my friends to see them.
My friend asking me if I'll be showing up to the Atheist Association meetup isn't weird, but I wouldn't necessarily want my boss to see the message.
Wow. I'm glad I don't live in a country where that would even be an issue. It would never occur to me as something anyone would need to be private in any country(until now).
(Or do you work for a fundamentalist religious organisation?)
Where? Keep my naked girlfriend pics in a recipe box? Wtf are you even saying?
I'd rather not turn into a dull prude just because apple is too lazy to implement a guest account on their unix OS.
I'm trying to imagine how dull and colorless your life must be. I took the pictures with my phone. The obvious place to keep them is on my phone.
is: "I keep naked girlfriend pics on my iPhone. I don't think that's weird, but I don't want someone to see them."
I see your point. I apologize for using the word "weird." I assume that's what the downvotes were for.
I am amused by the idea of rubber-hose cryptography though - beating on the data until it encrypts itself!
Lots of folks hand their smartphone to their kids to play games and even if there's nothing sensitive on there, they might have things they don't want deleted like treasured photos and videos.
Since I've already been perfectly demanding|whining about a feature I'd like to have, what I _really_ want is to just click a program that boots up a vm with the same OS, but only the browser ready to go with a fresh lack of cookies, history, etc.
IS THAT REALLY SO MUCH TO ASK? </overdramatic>
This is primarily a problem on my laptop which lumps to much diverse media together.
Take Windows for example, sure you can setup multiple user accounts with different levels of privilege , access to website and apps etc but how many people outside of a corporate or academic setting actually use this?
Whenever I borrow someones laptop they just use their own login, sometimes I find porn in their Internet history but at the end of the day who cares?
Perhaps this is more of a problem for people with kids who might want to use the internet themselves but when their child uses it they don't want them to have access to certain sites or see that their parent has accessed certain sites.
One issue I have with android is that when I clear the history in the browser and delete all cookie etc etc.
If I hit the back button it still goes back to whatever I visited last , also if I goto google and tap the search bar all my previous searches come up. It's not really very privacy friendly.
Hopefully this problem will pass once everyone has a smartphone so they don't need to borrow someone elses.
Most people don't seem to really understand the benefit of doing this though, I've seen couples argue because they both keep changing preferences on a shared computer when multiple logins would solve their problems.
Android should be able to support this feature down the line too.
1. You are using an app
2. You activate 'Guest mode' using a button press, swipe, tap, etc. (configurable)
3. If the user hits the home button, it redirects to the lockscreen instead of the homescreen (much like the Camera application does in lock-mode)
4. Instead of the camera icon on the lockscreen when you double tap, it is the icon of the locked-in application. (You can tap it to resume use of the locked-in application)
5. To disable this guest mode, you simply unlock the device with your passcode.
So, when a friend asks "Hey can I check my email?", you can open Safari, enable this guest mode, and hand the phone to him, no worries.
What do you think?
can you provide a sandboxed environment? he can't have access to any of my persistent Safari data (autofill/bookmarks/history/cookies/dbs/etc.), and any he creates should be wiped, probably on return to the lockscreen. all other forms of app switching (e.g. open a pdf url, then "open in" iBooks/goodReader/whatever) will need to be blocked as well. will also have to block the app tray, the notification center, pop-up/banner notifications, Siri, and possibly the phone. (could experiment with blocking badges and alerts but not sounds, since that only reveals the fact that an email/text/etc. was received, not any specific information about it.) might conceivably need to block all background app network traffic, tho i'm not sure if that's snoopable from inside safari.
basically os x guest mode
It would be nice if iOS would support multiple user accounts/profiles, especially for games - so when a user is "logged in" a game's saved progress would be tailored for that specific user.
Maybe I'm missing something important here, but it seems many apps on the Android market are just a few tweaks away from doing this already?
case 1: no apps. guest has to install apps. will guest have a itunes/android market account? does he enter his Credit card to buy paid ones he want to use?
case 2: apps with no data from real user. He opens up foursquare/yelp to look for a restaurant... has to create profile
And that somehow makes it totally useless?
He can: talk on the phone, check his email on the web browser, surf to anything he likes, use any other app that doesn't require a profile, play a game, ..., ..., ...
Even calling case 1 "totally useless" is retarded. He can still do tons of stuff (call, browse, use as calculator, ...) except run apps.
Their approach is targeted at kids though, I'd love to see someone tackle the general purpose approach.
Sounds like a great project for someone with a lot of free time. I rememeber hearing that the guy who came up with what is currently the ios notification style was hired by Apple after his jailbroken hack.
The void is wide open for someone to solve this well and be rewarded for it
I'd like to be truly responsible and just turn my phone off, but I don't to allow for those few times when there actually is something important.
Hooking it up to the stereo system makes it feel like it is part of the vehicle. Some day, when I am feeling adventurous, I will wire the otherwise useless OnStar button to trigger it to complete the "factory look."
Are people really handing their phones out that often?
I only hand my phone to someone else when:
* I've asked them to take a photo of me.
* They're riding shotgun in my car and need to call a contact or navigate with info readily available on my phone.
Neither situation is risk for people snooping around.
Also, some people just don't consider their phones private and don't understand why anyone else would. My parents or siblings sometimes want to flip through Gallery to see the newest pictures of my children, friends, or co-workers.
A couple misplaced photos can be quite the liability in a situation like that...
presumably the same technology could be used to provide "normal" and guest environments.
[1] mozilla had multiple profile support since forever, but it required you to restart the browser with a command line argument, or requires you to pick a profile every time, and even then it's not "guest" profile -- it's another profile with history and all. When I needed multiple profiles, it was always easier to set up another user on Linux. [On windows, at least in the 2000 days, the new browser would defer to the old one that was already on screen even if they were RunAs different users -- a different "desktop session" was required for separation. bleh]
Maybe just for browsing the internet it would be allright, but I won't hand over my passwords. Isn't there any keylogger yet for android/ios? You don't even need to go by the store/marketplace, just local, developper stuff and there you go. Do you want to log on my machine?
Guest mode: enable the “Guest Mode” toggle in the panel, and your calls and text messages logs will be hidden, and all installed applications cannot be removed. You may have a try when you need to show your phone to guests or children.
Also, I'm a bit afraid implementing full-featured multiple user sessions (similar to a desktop OS) would lead to a lot more bloat.
I would imagine at that time, they might support Guest logins.
EDIT: the implementation detail of Face recognition talked above is my own take on how it should be done. Not suggested by the referenced article.
The use-case for it usually suggested is one VM for work, one for personal use, but it could be used for this scenario too.
Quote: Which has revealed a feature that the Tab needs: a button in Gmail called “in strange hands”. The device is profoundly shareable, but mine has my Google email, full of threads that are distinctly not for public eyes. So I need to switch to disable that while letting people look at interesting web sites or play games or check stock prices or whatever. End Quote
[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smartanuj.hideitpr...
Please make Android grow multi-user capabilities or give me ChromeOS in a tablet format.
simplification enhances usability. the vast majority of smartphone and tablet users are happy that all that complicated IT/nerd stuff went away on their devices.
the complications you would introduce by user switching are big. you need to add UI elements to tell the user at all times in which mode they are, you need new dialogs to switch, etc etc. the android status bar already looks like a badly maintained win xp install with all that crap in it.
built by developers for developers. brrr.
