Author: Julie Campbell

Geolocation technology helps reduce the risk of credit card fraud

| October 17, 2014

When a credit card transaction is denied outside of its owner’s home country, up to 80 percent are false positives.

Mastercard is now using geolocation technology in order to help to reduce the frequency of “false positives” that are occurring when one of their customers has attempted to use his or her card in a legitimate way, but has had the transaction denied as it registers as potentially fraudulent.

This is an opt-in service that allows a customer to be matched with his or her location to validate a transaction.

This service uses the geolocation technology in a customer’s smartphone so that when they leave their home country and attempt to use their credit card, their location can be confirmed as being the same as that of the transaction, so that the purchase will not be flagged as a potentially risky one and a false positive can be avoided. For this program, MasterCard is working with Syniverse, an IPX provider, which has access to over six billion individual mobile subscribers who are located in over two hundred different countries.

The goal of this use of geolocation technology is to use mobile security methods to boost transaction authentication.

Geolocation Technology - Credit Card FraudAccording to the CMO of Syniverse, Mary Patterson Clark, “We’re providing an additional layer of fraud protection for when a consumer is on the road.” She added that “Over and above the existing fraud protection, [MasterCard is] offering this additional opt-in fraud protection offer to their customers.”

What Clark described was a system in which the MasterCard certificate generates a token and then sends it to the platform that has been enabled by that credit card giant and Syniverse. With this, Syniverse is able to compare the location of the MasterCard and the location of the user at his or her last registration update. If those two positions are nearby, then the transaction will not be flagged as potentially fraudulent.

The company is not only hoping to continue with the reduction in false positive identifications of fraud that it has already been achieving through this geolocation technology, but it will also use it to help to make it easier for travelers to purchase prepaid data packages while they are away from home.

Mobile technology trends shows that teen boys and girls text differently

| October 15, 2014

The results of a recent study have shown that the texting language that is used is different between the sexes.

Adolescence is a time in which self expression can feel as though it is quite challenging and complicated, and with the added number of channels that are now available for communication – from in-person to phone, video calling, emailing, social media posts, and texting, among others – online and mobile technology appear to be revealing trends in the way that teens talk.

Texting has become an especially important channel for social communication among teenagers.

This seemingly basic form of communication gives teens the opportunity to talk to others – including people from the opposite sex – without being watched over by peer groups or their parents, in the majority of circumstances. Now, research published in the Journal of Children and Media has looked into the way that this mobile technology is used, and the trends in language and how they differ between the sexes and in overall gender identity when using text.

This mobile technology based study was conducted across four different American cities within nine focus groups.

Mobile Technology - Teen BoysEach focus group contained participants between 12 and 18 years of age. The mobile technology investigation was designed to provide a broad understanding of the way that teens communicate over smartphones. They looked into a number of different kinds of social interaction, and what they found notable was that even over mobile devices, the historical language use differences between males and females appeared to be maintained in the texting styles used by the boys and girls who participated.

While the boys in the study viewed their mobile devices as a kind of status symbol for the performance of a certain function, girls were more interested in chatting and socializing. The boy side of a conversation was fast and direct, with a specific purpose in mind, and then it was over, for example, making arrangements to meet. One of the boys implied that long text conversations were exclusively for girls. Another called the tests that girls send “just BS”.

The girls, on the other hand, liked to socialize and converse over text, and used smiley faces and emoticons to enhance their words. They viewed texting over mobile technology as another way of building and maintaining their friendships. What was interesting was that when boys were texting girls, the guys admitted to “playing the game,” that is, using longer and emotive texts to avoid misrepresenting themselves which could lead to hurt feelings.