I’ve written several times (1, 2, 3, 4) about how China has embraced the digital life and use their smartphones for everything from paying for lunch to interacting with the government. This is made possible largely by the WeChat and Alipay apps. These apps provide a portal into every possible service and since they’re linked to the user’s bank account, it’s easy to pay for just about anything with a smartphone.
You can check out my previous posts to see how it works but there’s a nice video from the Wall Street Journal’s Moving Upstream YouTube video collection that looks at the phenomenon and talks with Naomi Wu, a well-known maker and tech person living in Shenzhen. Wu says that she does still carry some cash but only for emergencies. Duncan Turner, a westerner living and working in Shenzhen says he never carries cash and can’t remember the last time he did. He pays for everything with WeChat.
The video also explores the privacy issue. WeChat and Alipay collect a huge amount of information and know basically everything about everybody. The Chinese, though, have a different reaction to privacy concerns: they don’t really care. When one of the WSJ reporters remarks to Wu that WeChat can tell the government everything about her, she shrugs it off saying, “They already know everything about me. If I’m not committing a crime, they don’t give a shit.”
We here at Irreal are not nearly so sanguine about privacy, of course, and that attitude is probably shared by a majority of those in the West. That’s why I think it unlikely that we’ll end up with something like WeChat but I do expect to see services like Apple Pay expand and for Uber-like applications to proliferate. The difference is that there won’t be a single portal as there is in China. That will doubtless be less convenient but at least no single entity will know everything about us. Except the government. But as Wu says, they probably already know everything about us anyway.