Near the end of Cringely’s latest column, he briefly introduces the idea of the mobile phone replacing the Social Security number as an identifier. To be precise, he said “supplementing,” not “replacing,” and it was as a financial identifier, but I’m thinking in broader terms than the problem that he’s talking about. Plus, I don’t have an SSN, and in Canada you’re supposed to have some level of privacy around our equivalent, the Social Insurance Number. In theory, anyway.
The thing of it is, and I don’t have the numbers, but I expect that we’ll see a point where more people will have mobile phones than credit cards (that could very well be already true on a global level). Of course, people can and do also have more than one mobile phone, so it’s not a one to one relationship, but the potential still exists to take huge advantage of what’s becoming an ubiquitous inferface with built in processing power.
Think about it, why would we need smart cards when we can already exchange messages over Bluetooth? I’ve been thinking about public key authorization/authentication schemes lately (though in a “wouldn’t it be cool if” fashion, not as in “I’m going to spend time implementing this”), and there’s no reason why a purchase couldn’t be authorized at point of sale through a key exchange on a mobile phone, including PIN entry if desired.
The best part? It wouldn’t have to involve the wireless carriers at all – while direct billing to my cell phone bill would be cool, I have no faith in the carriers to actually pull this off at a level that would get adoption rates high enough. This could hook into existing credit card/debit infrastructure.
Well, there is one reason why this wouldn’t work -most consumers can’t do basic things on their phones. A year ago I helped out at a trade show selling ringtones, and I’d walk people through the process, which, since the offering was off-deck, involved sending a premium SMS to get a WAP push. Everybody who did it got their tone, but in each and every case, there was a different process to actually download and save the message – and this is even on different phones by the same manufacturer.
This is where I’m (mildly) interested in the Google Phone OS – I haven’t read the specs, but I could care less about the developer model – if they can standardize the interface even a little, it’s going to go a long way towards making even the possibility of mobile phone-based payment authentication happen. No retail worker (or the lineup behind you) is going to want to spend time helping you figure out how your phone works. In that sense, it’s a solution looking for a problem, and for this to work, it would have to be about as fast as a card swipe/PIN entry combined with a higher degree of security.
Is it worth the effort? I think that adoption at the retail level can bring in enough interest to find fun new ways to use the technology – single signon for websites (replacing RSA gadgets or via integration with OpenID, for example), gas pump payments (granted, not much different than retail, but no, no explosion risk, move along), and even the holy grail of person to person transactions (last seen in the precursor to PayPal).
Mostly though, I’m pissed off that we’ve been carrying computers in our pockets for years and until the iPhone came out (which is more potential than real new features at this point), all we’ve been using them for is to make phone calls and check email.
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