Slashdot Mirror
Contactless Credit Cards
An anonymous reader writes "According to his article in EETimes, Visa and Philips are teaming up to introduce a so-called "contactless credit card". Basically it'll work like the proximity cards many of us use for access to our places of work or apartments. You won't need to physically swipe it, simply waving it over a reader is good enough."
Let's see. A crowded line at an amusement park... I'm sure I could pick up 100 credit card numbers an hour with my wiz-bang pocket card reader. "Excuse me sir... I didn't mean to bump into you..."
That's how I pay for gas at Mobil, with their Speedpass. It's a small keychain thing that looks like a black magot:
Well, that was how I paid for gas at Mobil. I cut my Speedpass open, took out the glass cylinder, and put it inside my Nextel i90 cell phone, it fit next to the battery. The Speedpass only lasted a few months before dieing. I haven't tried it again yet...
It was cool when it worked though, I just held my cell phone up to the pump to pay for gas.
tbdean
Hell, there's even a simpler problem: If I have more than one credit card which one will it "charge?" Or will it charge both?
Other than the magnetic strip not wearing out, what's the advantage?
When I lived in Hong Kong there was a smart card (not Credit Card) called Octopus. Basically, you buy the smart-card, you add cash funds to it, and then you can use it to ride the train system.
It was incredibly convenient, not to have to buy tickets, and much greater throughput than ticket machines. You just walked through the gate and swiped your wallet over the reader.
Anyways, it wasn't long before they figured out the advantage of converting the vending machines in the station over to Octopus. No cash to collect, just fill it up with product and collect the money from the Octopus administrators, less administrative fee.
I can tell you from experience, it beats the hell out of coins, changing money, messing about with cash, fumbling about with change. Just swipe your card and get your product. Faster, easier and much more effecient.
Best of all, the cards were anonymous, which means the govt couldn't track you via the card. Disadvantage of course is that if the card was lost or stolen, there was no recovery. I guess for that reason the maximum you could put on the card was HK$500.
To me this was the first step towards an anonymous cashless society, which despite the Orwellian protests of the tin-foilers, is IMO, A Good Thing(tm). Money spreads disease, has an administrative cost, is vunerable to forgery. If we can have all the advantages of cash, including anonymity, then I say, let's get rid of cash.
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie