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Contactless Credit Cards

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-crowd-me-in-line dept.

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."

17 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Good and badGood and badGood and Bad by krray · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I like the convenience idea of it. The magnetic strip in my credit cards are usually destroyed/useless before the card even expires. Between rubbing against other credit cards, contact with the leather, and/or body sweat highly used cards are usually replaced before they ?expire?.

    Where?s the security? I often wonder why the heck credit card purchases don?t require a PIN at the very least. Yeah, we?re all high tech and thumb prints and/or eye scans would be cool, but I?m all for having to know and enter a PIN on each and every purchase.

    I tend to go for EFT payment whenever possible as I do have to enter a PIN. Shoulder surfing or a corrupt security camera guy is always a problem. I?m smart enough to remember a purchase PIN and a ATM/Cash type transaction PIN too. I suppose insurance costs and ?shrink? just isn?t too expensive yet?

    I?d be impressed if there was a thumb reader built into each plastic card I waived around buying all my shit.

    Mobile gas anyone?

    1. Re:Good and badGood and badGood and Bad by the_bahua · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would be interested to know how they would be able to stop "contactless thieves" in this case. It seems to me that scanners would become available for people to walk around zapping people's funds away from them. One nice thing about the tried and true swipecards is that to charge them, it's very much a physical action.

      At the very least, the signature process should be retained.

    2. Re:Good and badGood and badGood and Bad by FatRatBastard · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    3. Re:Good and badGood and badGood and Bad by teknokracy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And then it comes down to the point where you have the fact that the card could just as easily be stolen. No amount of encryption would protect a card from that.

    4. Re:Good and badGood and badGood and Bad by b0r1s · · Score: 5, Informative


      I would be interested to know how they would be able to stop "contactless thieves" in this case. It seems to me that scanners would become available for people to walk around zapping people's funds away from them. One nice thing about the tried and true swipecards is that to charge them, it's very much a physical action.

      Not entirely true. One of the more common credit card scams here in Los Angeles is portable card scanners being carried by waiters in restaurants. As they take the card you've handed them back to scan it for the bill, they scan it in their personal scanner, which records the information for later use.

      There is no meaningful physical location tied to this because you've given your card (intentionally) to someone you have to trust. If you eat at multiple restaurants over the course of a week, there's no easy way to trace the theft back to an individual location.

      --
      Mooniacs for iOS and Android
    5. Re:Good and badGood and badGood and Bad by Jetson · · Score: 5, Informative
      The magnetic strip in my credit cards are usually destroyed/useless before the card even expires.

      My cards usually crack from curvature long before the stripe is demagnetized or worn away. I guess that's what comes from sitting on your wallet all the time.

      FWIW, Esso Canada (gas station chain) has been using keychain-dongles for rapid payment for about a year now. You just hold your keys in front of the coloured box on the pump for a few seconds and it prepares to make the sale exactly the way it would if you stuck your card in the stripe reader. They also put the same dongle-reader at each cash register so you can buy your morning coffee a few seconds faster....

  2. Contactless? Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    They won't know where to send the bill!

  3. Pickpocket from a distance... by bgog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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..."

  4. Perfect business opportunity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Shielded wallets/credit card holders. Someone call ThinkGeek.

    1. Re:Perfect business opportunity by GnarlyNome · · Score: 5, Funny

      How about the RFID tag in the tinfoil?

      --
      Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
  5. Mobil Speedpass by tbdean · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  6. Contactless credit cards? by cperciva · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've been using a contactless credit card for years. I type the number into an HTML form, and my card never comes within the same city as the merchant I'm purchasing something from. For that matter, it sometimes isn't in the same city as I am when I'm making the purchase -- for a couple months last year it was on a different continent.

    In fact... let me see here... no, I still haven't gotten around to signing the back.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  7. Comments by proxy by NeoPotato · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's not a new concept. We already practice it here at Slashdot - we don't even have to read the article, we just get near the story and start spouting off comments.

  8. I can see a new Amazon patent by DannyiMac · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can see Amazon patenting 0-click technology with this...

    --
    - Danny
  9. Re:Why by thirdrock · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ...
  10. Octopus by ZarathustraThePolarB · · Score: 5, Informative
    In Hong Kong we've had a similar technology for several years now. It's called the Octopus card and virtually everyone in the city has one. It can be used for payment on nearly all public transport and in stores where people make small purchases.

    The EE Times article focuses on the technology is a bit light on details of what the card actually does, so I'm not sure if it is a stored-value card (like Octopus) or actually operates like a credit card. I would be surprised if it's the latter because of concerns about theft etc.

  11. For the naysayers... by SamMichaels · · Score: 5, Informative

    The place where I used to work had these key fobs which worked like that. I thought it'd be cool that we just had to walk next to the door and it'd open it.

    Not.

    Even when directly contacting the sensor with the key fob in my pocket it didn't activate it. It had to be held infront of the device, almost touching it.

    Whatever the range they say, I'm sure you're not going to be able to sniff out the RF signal by just sitting next to someone unless you have some expensive equipment.