“Apple doesn’t discuss future product plans, but it appears likely that the company is aggressively pursuing the development of technologies that replace IDs, passwords and credit cards,” Mike Elgan reports for Computerworld.
“Two years ago, Apple was in the news for patenting a range of biometric ID tools for the iPhone, such as a voice recognition system, a retinal scanner that uses the phone’s camera or, most likely, a system that uses the screen to scan fingerprints,” Elgan reports. “Last year, Apple hired an expert in Near Field Communication, or NFC, to head up the company’s Mobile Commerce department. NFC is technology that enables the transfer of data over distances of just a few inches — a model that’s far more secure and reliable than, say, Bluetooth. Other inside sources have been quoted as saying that Apple plans to build NFC into the iPhone 5. Apple has also recently advertised three job openings related to payment platforms and short-range wireless data transfers. And Apple has been granted NFC-related patents.”
Elgan reports, “Of course, it could be a while before you can use an iPhone as a universal debit card. It could take Apple some time to establish the partnerships and programs necessary to get every gas station and grocery store to support iTunes. But the password-killing ID card functionality could exist on Apple systems as early as this year, or most likely next year… I believe that it will soon be possible to live without passwords or credit cards. If Apple builds in these capabilities, you can be sure Google will. And if Apple and Google do it, so will all of their competitors.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
@ElderNorm
I has the same good experience with the electronic boarding pass. I hope all airlines adopt that soon.
I also had paper backups-just in case!
NFC in Japan for years. We may see the same growth problems.
Here is an excerpt from a summertime article:
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Japan boasts the largest deployment of contactless-mobile phones in the world by far, a rollout that began six years ago. More than 60 million phones carrying the NFC-like FeliCa chip from Japan’s Sony Corp. are in circulation, which can be used for a range of services, including transit ticketing, airline check-in and building access.
But payment has always been the premier application backers have promoted. And according to DoCoMo, more than 1.1 million shops now accept a range of contactless-payment applications that subscribers can download or activate. That figure probably includes vending machines and taxis.
Yet, most independent observers agree take-up of contactless-mobile payment by Japanese consumers has been disappointing.
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Here is the full article: http://www.nfctimes.com/news/report-japan-s-m-payment-players-discover-points-count
They will have to, and probably will ,make this an OPEN SOURCE product/project
There’s an old adage: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Biometrics and unified password systems are interesting and sometimes convenient. But there is much more safety in having a diversity of protections over having one line of defense, even if the single one seems stronger/better than any individual one. If someone gets one password, that’s bad, and they might do a lot of damage; but it’s limited. But if they can get ahold of your universal password or force you to use your biometric super pass, and everything is tied to that, it’s all lost. Ever heard of “plausible deniability”? In a universal password system, there is none. (Unless you’ve secretly made one; but then it’s no longer universal.)
Any radio transmission is receivable at a distance given a higher gain antenna. Radio is inherently insecure as transmissions from phones can be captured and reproduced or spoofed. RFID credit cards are bad- this will only make the situation worse. If Apple is trying to increase security by eliminating passwords, they’ve done the opposite by introducing RF as an attack vector.