Mobile Phones Becoming Wallets

from the it's-happening dept

Mon, Oct 13th 2003 10:48am — Mike Masnick

I recently wrote about the trend towards using a mobile phone for small transactions and suggested it could eventually become a "digital wallet". Over in South Korea, it appears they're well on their way to having that come true. Thanks to a standard created by the major telecom companies, banks and credit card companies, a basic system for doing payments via mobile phones has been catching on quickly. They say the system is secure, fast and easy. Some are even taking the technology one step further, letting people use their mobile phones for things like opening locked doors and borrowing books. Basically, this is just extending the same technology that was made popular about five years ago when Mobil introduced their "SpeedPass" technology, that let you pay for your gas with an RFID chip embedded in a keychain. Now, they're taking that chip, putting it in your mobile phone, and agreeing to standards to make it possible to pay for many more things. Of course, if this really catches on, people will become much more demanding of sturdy mobile phones, because if it breaks, it will be the equivalent to having your wallet stolen - as you'll suddenly be without cash or ID.

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Jake Kaldenbaugh, 13 Oct 2003 @ 4:43pm

Broken Phone Not A Problem
The phone could update a central server with the amount on a periodic basis. Break your phone, and you get a new one and download the update. If each phone carried a unique ID for the account, they could issue you another phone with some kind of account reservation to ensure you're not committing fraud (i.e. perform a big transaction, then break the phone before it updates the server).
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