It's honestly hard to believe that any institution of higher learning (*cough*) could be so short-sighted. This is something universities should have done years ago. They could advertise or not, as they saw fit. Honestly, I wouldn't (in theory - I graduated years ago) mind if my uni ran a few ads to help pay for the service. What really pisses me off is the profiling, targeted marketing, etc.
Dammit, the whole freaking Internet was created at Universities. Why are they resting on their laurels now? Where's Urbana-Champaign when you need it?
We should be asking ourselves what we want the on-line transaction of the future to look like. This is certainly one way of doing it, and you can bet that Visa and Mastercard will shortly follow suit, but is it the best way?
It certainly has advantages over typing your card number into 50 different on-line databases, but your credit card itself is still the weak link in the chain. Sooner or later the question of authentication will rear its ugly head. How do you know that it was really Joe Shopper requesting that disposable number, and not Joe Cracker?
On another note, notice how anonymity is hyped in the article, and sometimes used in place of privacy? Do we have an unlikely ally in our quest for true web anonymity (i.e. "You don't know who I am."), as opposed to privacy (i.e. "We know who you are. Trust us; we'll try really hard not to tell anyone.")?
Lastly, as another poster already said, the government is sure to get twitchy about this. How will they tax anonymous purchases? Requisition monthly transacion records from AmEx?
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It's honestly hard to believe that any institution of higher learning (*cough*) could be so short-sighted. This is something universities should have done years ago. They could advertise or not, as they saw fit. Honestly, I wouldn't (in theory - I graduated years ago) mind if my uni ran a few ads to help pay for the service. What really pisses me off is the profiling, targeted marketing, etc.
Dammit, the whole freaking Internet was created at Universities. Why are they resting on their laurels now? Where's Urbana-Champaign when you need it?
We should be asking ourselves what we want the on-line transaction of the future to look like. This is certainly one way of doing it, and you can bet that Visa and Mastercard will shortly follow suit, but is it the best way?
It certainly has advantages over typing your card number into 50 different on-line databases, but your credit card itself is still the weak link in the chain. Sooner or later the question of authentication will rear its ugly head. How do you know that it was really Joe Shopper requesting that disposable number, and not Joe Cracker?
On another note, notice how anonymity is hyped in the article, and sometimes used in place of privacy? Do we have an unlikely ally in our quest for true web anonymity (i.e. "You don't know who I am."), as opposed to privacy (i.e. "We know who you are. Trust us; we'll try really hard not to tell anyone.")?
Lastly, as another poster already said, the government is sure to get twitchy about this. How will they tax anonymous purchases? Requisition monthly transacion records from AmEx?