Conclusion
The author looks to South Africa, where people who still live in primitive conditions and in remote locations have access to some of the latest technology. It was not possible or feasible to run electric cables and communication lines to small, nomadic villages, yet they have "leapfrogged" forward with technology.
In one example, people in a remote village that lacks electricity and running water use Nokia 2G smart phones to keep in touch with family in cities far away and to manage online bank accounts. To keep the phones pf villagers charged, one woman in the village carries a car battery twenty miles each day to the nearest source of electricity.
Some mention is made of the micro-banking industry, in which the amount of money a person handles is very small, and the charges for transactions are often less than a penny, which is necessary in developing nations where most people and even small business owners deal in small amounts of cash and would not qualify for traditional banking. In volumes of transactions, such banks are far more popular, and their customer have a higher adoption rate of mobile.
It's noted that many of these micro banks are sorely lacking in security, with many transactions being done over unencrypted SMS messages from unregistered devices (most users are on prepaid cellular), but the aggregate amount is still so small that they are not attractive to thieves and fraudsters.
Mobile communications technology has also been used to enable people in the same villages to have access to health care - to contact a doctor in a remote location who can diagnose an injury or disease and provide guidance for treatment, or even to use "kits" that enable people to take basic readings such as pulse and blood pressure and transmit them electronically. While this is far from quality care as it is understood in the developed world, it is a considerable leap forward for people in primitive conditions to get reliable guidance.
The areas of financial services and medical care are perhaps the two most "sensitive" in the developed world, where people would be less impressed by the capabilities of technology and more horrified by the notion that someone might see their personal information being transmitted, unencrypted, over wireless networks. A lack of such sensitivity enables those in less developed areas of the world to take greater advantage of the potential technology provides.
(EN: This is a bit lopsided, as there is also the necessity of it. Thieves and hackers aren't interested in the bank balances of people who have very little money, and when a person hunts and fishes for their living, there is no employer to discriminate against a person with a medical condition and prevent them from doing things they are plainly capable of doing. The notion that privacy is a silly superstition does not hold when you consider the likelihood of abuse and misuse in a more structured society.)
The author strays over a handful of the topics that have been discussed in the preceding chapters: that no level of security is impregnable, that our reliance on technology requires us to communicate more information, and that ultimately it is up to the consumer to decide how much he will pay to increase security and how much he will allow security to be compromised for the sake of convenience.