Paying With the Wave of a Cellphone

holy_calamity writes "Tech Review discusses how it will soon be possible to pay in stores by waving your cellphone over a contactless reader, thanks to new handsets due next year, and RFID stickers and cases offered today by firms including Visa. It's convenient for shoppers, but a major driver of the technology is the opportunity for retailers to gain access to their customers' cellphones and social networks for marketing purposes."

Comments

Re:Let's just implant RFID chips in our hands

[elsJake]

RFID arm band , problem solved and no blood spilled.

Re:Old people already use that in Japan

[coalrestall]

On an average commute (the times where you really get to see what phones everybody are using), I'd say anywhere from a third to half of the phones I see people with are iPhones. It's certainly not a failure here, though if it were to be, it wouldn't be the RFID payment thing (which most people don't use because it's damn near impossible to figure out unless you're the sort of person that regularly posts to Slashdot). It would be because it can't handle websites aimed at Japanese phones, by which I mean the vast majority of websites accessed via a QR code printed somewhere which actually go as far as to completely block access to all but regular phone browsers. These sites are a valuable source of games (very bad ones), discount coupons, postage stamp sized pictures of celebrities that you get to set as your background screen for free, and other such wonders which are fantastically important to the phone buying market.

Re:Mark of the beast!

[tlhIngan]

Please reply to what the GP actually posted. Their bible quote points out that eventually *everyone* will have to have the "mark" to do transactions. There eventually will be no opting out. You're better off not replying if you aren't going to read what the person whote that you are replying directly to.

Or we could say it already happened, if we take the "mark" to be credit. To participate in modern society, one has to have a credit history. It's very difficult to live a cash-only life - things like buying a house often require borrowing money (there aren't too many people who can drop the cash to buy a house - and if you can, you probably are smart enough to figure out that it can be more lucrative to keep the cash in investments and borrow the amount). So you need a mortgage, and lenders often jack up the interest rate to those without credit histories.

And with employers wanting access to credit histories, as well as insurers and the like, well, it seems to live one must have a credit history.