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

Yeah, right

[balaband]

Like losing your cellphone wasn't bad enough so far?

Mobile banking

[Anonymous Coward]

How many transactions will I be doing from my pocket on a crowded subway?

Re:Mobile banking

[Chrisq]

How many transactions will I be doing from my pocket on a crowded subway?

I don't know but with any luck you will be paying for my porn site subscription and enough credit to download the videos on my anonymous PAYG phone. I might have enough credit left to call uncle Osama too. I don't know which will be worse, explaining to your wife about the porn or to the police about the calls to suspicious people in Afghanistan.

Re:Mobile banking

[tophermeyer]

I would hope that the user can control that. Personally I think I would prefer to have to explicitly authorize every single transaction.

I think it could be done conveniently though. Either by having the user up an app real quick to enable the RFID chip, or by prompting for a PIN whenever a transaction is attempted.

and...

[polle404]

And the blackhat standing by the exit door with a 50$ RFID-reader gets my account as well.
They're gonna need some very hefty security measures to get me on that bandwagon, thankyouverymuch!

"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."
Is NOT helping in convincing me.

I don't want a facebook/twitter update of what I bought and where, every time I shop.

Re:and...

[CharmElCheikh]

And the blackhat standing by the exit door with a 50$ RFID-reader gets my account as well.

I work at a company who works on the cellphone side of the thing. It's been part of the specs since the first drafts that transfers require a manual validation (press a button) to occur. Did you really think you were the first to think of that.

Re:and...

[drsmithy]

It's ridiculous what kind of information people will willingly give up for the sake of social networking novelty.

Personally I find the narcissism of social networking *far* more ridiculous than the "giving up information part".

Though I imagine the two are linked - "I know I'm not important enough for anyone to give a shit about me, but maybe if I tell the whole world everything I do, I can pretend they all want to know, and the conclude that I'm actually giving something up by broadcasting everything from what's on TV to the consistency of my stool".

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

[TheLink]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3697940.stm

The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.

This sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical.

Why a cellphone?

[srussia]

My bank already issued me an RFID-fitted credit card... which I don't use.

Dreaming.

[Anonymous Coward]

We can't even get chip-based cards fully deployed universally let alone this.

Re:First call

[mcvos]

I actually do want RFID capability in my phone. But only if that means I can have a built-in RFID Guardian.

But giving retailers access to all my contacts? Why the hell would I want to do that?

Mark of the beast!

[Anonymous Coward]

[13:16] And it maketh all, the small, and the great, and the rich, and the poor, and the freemen, and the servants, that it may give to them a mark upon their right hand or upon their foreheads, [13:17] and that no one may be able to buy, or to sell, except he who is having the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. --Revelations 13:16-17, New Testament (Young's Literal Translation)

I know it's against Slashdot protocol and all to cite religious texts, but if this isn't the prophecy from the Book of Revelation coming true, I don't know what is. I don't know about the rest of you, but the first time they try to inject that thing into my hand, I'm going to cite this religion text and state boldly and unwaveringly that it is against my religion to have an RFID implant. Posted AC because the mere mention of religion here without bashing it poses great risk to karma.

Re:Mark of the beast!

[mikael_j]

It sounds to me that you're implying that the bible quote is somehow an accurate prediction of the future. I'm having a bit of trouble believing in that. Even if it becomes extremely common (which I doubt).

Also, it's a quote from a collection of fairy tales several thousand years old, hardly an accurate prediction of technological progress or world events.

Re:Mark of the beast!

[ultranova]

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.

Let's assume Bible to be inerrant. Let's also assume that this particular quote was meant as a prediction of future events thousands of years away; there's a pretty strong argument that the whole Book of Revelation was written as a thinly-disguised "fuck you" to the Roman Empire, who had a habit of putting their rulers portraits on their money (so you'd have to take the "image of the beast" into your hand to conduct transactions) and requiring worship of said rulers, and had a ruler (Nero) who had just died but was rumored to be alive and about to return, was commonly considered a beast, and who's name can be read as "666" by a common numerological method of the time, but let's ignore all that.

Even with these assumptions, your argument is illogical. There is no reason to assume that RFID tags really are the fulfilment of a particular prophecy, just because they could be. You certainly can't assume that they are, then use that to "disprove" any counterarguments, for that is begging the question. The GP pointed out that RFID tags seem unlikely to go the way the Mark of the Beast is supposed to; that's evidence that RFID tags are not, in fact, Mark of the Beast, not that they are MotB and a miracle will enforce all the conditionals.

This is why religious arguments usually get modded down: even if you assume that said religion is correct, the arguments themselves tend to be one logical fallacy on top of another, and often completely incoherent.

Re:Mark of the beast!

[gad_zuki!]

Except, you know, context. The whole book was little more than a thinly veiled attack on the Roman authorities. John was very much an anti-establishment character. He was especially critical of the worship of the Emperor as a deity. Not to mention John, like most early Christians, expected all this to happen in his lifetime.

>but the first time they try to inject that thing into my hand

The same "they" that make you carry a cellphone? The same "they" that make you use facebook? If anything you'll be clamoring for the chip our of peer pressure and convenience. It turns out you don't need this mysterious oppressor or 1st conspiracy theories. You just need consumerism and laziness to end up with a chip in your hand. One of the neat things of capitalism is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself, the trick is not to hang yourself with it.

Re:Mark of the beast!

[gad_zuki!]

Exactly. The "mark" fear is based on the idea that a lot of Romans of non-proper birth were locked out of markets and opportunity. It was John's way of saying "Hey, they'll do this to all of us! Down with the Emperor! Christ will come in our lifetime, shut down the Emperor and save us."

Didn't exactly come to pass, but like Nostradamous or whomever, the emotionally unbalanced and credulous hold up these writings as accurate and simply reinterpret everything to fit modern history. When I was a kid Revelation fit in "perfect" with the Iranian revolution and with the lineage of European royal families. Now we're projecting onto RFIDs and IT. In 2050 we'll be projecting onto jetpacks and the founding of Saudi-Israel. Humans are just dumb irrational animals. Religion is proof of this.

Re:Mark of the beast!

[Culture20]

"the mark if the beast" is an outward sign that one is a follower of "the beast". It's a lot closer to saying "no one can buy or sell without proof of membership in X religion (or political party)."

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.

Re:Old people already use that in Japan

[elsJake]

Or the other way around.

Re:Old people already use that in Japan

[Luckyo]

Pretty much this. NFC payment via phones has been one of the main reasons why western style smartphones like iphone have been a complete and utter failure in Japan. If you can't even do basic things like pay for your train ticket with a smartphone, then what good is the smart part?

Imagine an iphone that you couldn't send or receive text messages with. Would you buy it? NFC payments are so widespread there that it's in the same general category in Japan.

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.

Store loyalty cards...

[VShael]

are also "a benefit" to the customer, in terms of discounts. But again, your giving your data to the shop and anyone else they pass it to.

I don't use loyalty cards, I won't use this. If they want my data, let them break the law to get it, just like the government does.

Re:It already exists

[lingon]

The "no way you can have it done from your pocket" only applies for zero gain antennas. The black hat standing at the exit point, or better yet, in the van some meters away with a high gain parabolic antenna would tend to disagree.

Re:Old people already use that in Japan

[coalrestall]

I would guess a lot of those people playing with iPhones have second phones as well. iPhone is still the second and third best selling phone in Japan at the moment (beaten from first only recently by an Android handset) so again, nothing like a failure. Source: http://www.analytica1st.com/2010/11/japan-best-selling-phones-apple-iphone.html The RFID enabled phones here do actually work quite well. They work on the train systems, convenience stores and news stands, some vending machines, an increasing number of restaurants, not to mention points cards at different stores etc. Additionally they can be used as coupons at places like McDonalds where you enter your discounted order onscreen then wave your phone over the sensor to order it. What makes it hard is that there isn't one universal card system that works everywhere; you have to install lots of different card type applications into the phone and activate each one individually. Thankfully the machines when you scan over them can broadly identify which card to charge, but if the same machine can access your suica card (for trains), your credit card and any of the several other payment option cards you have installed, you have to manually tell it which one to go for, after a bit of a while. You may as well have just gotten the right card out of your wallet in the first place. Oh, and with the exception of credit cards, putting money into the phone's RFID card for services such as Suica is a major hassle.

Re:Old people already use that in Japan

[nospam007]

"If you can't even do basic things like pay for your train ticket with a smartphone,"

I live in old Europe but I have been paying parking fees, train and bus tickets for years with my phone.
For the trains and buses the phone even _is_ the ticket, just an SMS that you show to the train/bus guy.
And I initiate the payment by sending a single letter as SMS message, completely under my control.

Not just Japan

[x_IamSpartacus_x]

Not just in japan. I submitted a story about Malaysia rolling this out over a year and a half ago. Heck, In 2007 Wells Fargo started testing a pay-by-phone in the USA. This has been happening in Asia for a long time and coming in the USA for a long time.

Re:First call

[Errol backfiring]

And do a lot of programming. For instance, I cannot remove those stupid facebook, twitter, etc "features" from my N900 because they are in the basic part of it. I am not sure if I even could remove them with a half year dedicated study of the OS and development documentation.

Re:First call

[shentino]

And desperate enough to void the warranty.

And gullible enough to risk having the vendor brick his device on purpose.

what

[fishingmachine]

so let me get this straight, you can only do it at certain retailers, with certain phones, there is a very small spending limit, it either a. charges with no notification posing obvious security risks or b. requires confirmation on the phone. while sharing your personal information with the retailer and marketers. can someone remind me how exactly this is more convenient than cash or credit card in any way at all?

Re:Old people already use that in Japan

[cayenne8]

I didn't even have to finish reading the synopsis here before clearly thinking:

Not A Chance In Hell

Geez...I don't want identifying RFID's on my tires, clothes, credit cards or passports, why the fsck would I want them for my phone and to actively contribute to corporations data stores on me and my habits?

I still prefer good old cash for most transactions.