UK proximity payments by phone this summer Everything Everywhere is launching proximity payments in the UK this summer in collaboration with Barclaycard. The service, which will come with a flagship handset supporting Near Field Communications, and a new pre-paid account, will be compatible with Barclaycard's existing payment infrastructure. So by this summer more than …
Now making stealing small quantities of money a lot of times an easy exercise for terrorists and organised crime
But hay the police will not bother with a £15 theft, even if it does occur 1m times per year in the country.
And the bank system gets it's money back, in the form of criminal and terrorist laundering accounts.
The FSA really needs to band this system, as the electronic banking equivelent of drink driving, and I'm sure somebody will argue for it along the lines of "and why should we be hassled to consider the impact to others?"
Ok... NFC payment systems detect unusual or too frequent use and ask for PIN Auth more quickly, they ask for PIN auth every so-often anyway.
The banks will refund fraudulant use, so even if the police aren't interested the banks will compensate you.
I'm not sure how you think money laundering works, but stealing £15 payments from individuals to use at grocery stores or coffeee shops is so far off it's untrue.
Banks do no like to host accounts of terrorists, it's staggeringly bad for business.
Banks are mandated to operate systems which detect money laundering and accounts used by or linked to people or organisations on the EU list which prohibits them holding of accounts. These systems are staggeringly complex multi-million pound data mines which track all financial activity within an organisation, gone are the days when known criminals or people who fund them can get away with holding bank accounts they aren't allowed to.
"gone are the days when known criminals or people who fund them can get away with holding bank accounts they aren't allowed to."
Hmm.
What about those that ARE allowed to? (3rd world dictators seem to do well)
What about secret accounts in Switzerland/Lichtenstein?
You seem to naively assume the world operates the same rules for everyone.
A lovely mentality for cattle, I'm sure...
When I can search the transactions to find out every time oligarch X or minister Y paid to take a shit at Paddington station, I may be more inclined to agree - but I'm pretty sure it would be me that has my behavior tracked, analysed, profiled, then manipulated in various ways that do violence to any notion of individuality we may hold.
@despairing citizen
"But hay the police will not bother with a ?15 theft, even if it does occur 1m times per year in the country."
@crowley
"When I can search the transactions to find out every time oligarch X or minister Y paid to take a shit at Paddington station, I may be more inclined to agree"
£15 to take a dump at Paddington? I know the economy is in the sh1tter but that's ridiculous!
Nice Theory.,...
and in a perfect world
shame about the practice.
Money laundering is a massive international business, and the good banks catch the tip of the iceberg, as many court cases have proven.
The bad banks deliberately dont look (Ok these aren't normally Euro operations)
but £15x1m acts is a £15m crime, and if somebody can make money at it, they will.
Aah, yes, old AC, 'the Beast 666' and all that...
...except he promoted the axiom "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", and elaborates here:
http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html
with:
1. Man has the right to live by his own law—
to live in the way that he wills to do:
to work as he will:
to play as he will:
to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.
2. Man has the right to eat what he will:
to drink what he will:
to dwell where he will:
to move as he will on the face of the earth.
3. Man has the right to think what he will:
to speak what he will:
to write what he will:
to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:
to dress as he will.
4. Man has the right to love as he will:—
"take your fill and will of love as ye will,
when, where, and with whom ye will." —AL. I. 51
5. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.
Which might just provide enough scope to will for consumer privacy.... don't you think?
So, move on, no irony here...
This is going to kick off the biggest 'small crime' spree since, well, ever!
I'm almost tempted to cash-in it's such an easy system to abuse with simple theft. (I won't though).
Anyway, I'm calling my bank this afternoon to get a replacement bank card that doesn't have the technology.
...is being tracked for you!
Looks like banks and governments don't like cash - makes it hard for them to profile you for their various nefarious purposes. And to make sure they take their cut.
Also, what's with Bill Ray's lust after NFC? I don't remember many posts by him other than his panting over NFC (maybe he writes other stuff, just not on topics that interest me?). Have to wonder is there any financial connections between him and NFC somehow - seems on odd topic for a Reg journo to have a boner over considering how many of the site's readers and other journos dislike of customer tracking technologies. It's probably perfectly honest, but I would like to know at some point why he is so hot on NFC (or a disclosure of interest, if that should happen to be the case).
NFC tacks you no more or less than using any bank card, magstripe, chip and pin or internet. Why do you think it would?
It was actually nice to read an article about NFC which was competently written and knocked down several of the popular mis-conceptions churned out ad infinitum in comments sections on the Reg.
New ways to make it easier to give your money to big coropration to "look after" for you. Because once your money is in your Everything Everywhere account, it isn't yours anymore.
Using your cash to credit an account that you can then use like cash to buy things.......I'm sure it'll be a massive hit.
I'm assuming complete traceability has been built into the system as well. That's a given.
This shit gives me the creeps.
Not in my house.
You again.
Personally, I withdraw CASH and spend it anonymously.
As 'Circadian' said before, banks/gov don't like that freedom.
As I said before that, I won't use NFC without that freedom.
Do you not like the freedom to operate independently of a data warehousing system?
Does it substitute for Jesus, and make you feel loved or something?
No, I just don't think each and every intimate detail of my life is any of their damn business, and so I'm not willing cattle waiting to be milked by the corporate machine.
There IS life outside of the consumer model of humanity, but my god they'll do their best to interrupt what little unprofitable spare time you still possess with some manipulation to consume, based on an ever sleeker, reduced, simplified, demeaning model of a human being.
But still, I won't deny anyone's right to be a one-dimensional economic unit.
It does however seem that my right to be otherwise may be increasingly constrained if the NFC bandwagon leads to a replacement of cash, and privacy.
It isn't an end to cash YET.
Motivations of marketing/taxation/etc will encourage it though.
Don't be sorry. I recognise that paranoia is a form of egotism - it's not a problem I'm having.
I don't live in fear. I don't even know who "the man" would be if I did.
Anyway, enough 'straw man' - got any counterpoints?
By the way, how come all these comments bitching at mine and others concerns about losing the privacy in transactions are all ACs? Smacks of hypocrisy, no?!
What are you? NFC evangelist or something?
"So how are you paid then?"
I thought you might say that.
I also use a bank, mobile phone service providers are not banks.
Money in a bank is still yours and is protected by various financial and legal mechanisms.
This is nothing more than a glorified paypal, and no, I don't use that either.
I don't trust my mobile phone service provider to provide a phone service competently and with an acceptable level of customer support, never mind allowing them to handle my cash for me for the sake of perceived convinience.
"NFC tacks you no more or less than using any bank card, magstripe, chip and pin or internet. Why do you think it would?"
Well sure, if one simply views this as yet another payment system, it's reasonable.
But we should be wary of the attempts to move to a cashless society - the point with schemes like these is that they are more often touted as being cash replacements, unlike credit/debit cards.
It's not just the concern of tracking or marketing, but also the problem that means of payment are now controlled by private companies - even worse if they are unregulated like Paypal. Issues like your credit being withheld, them randomly deciding to refuse transactions, or intentionally blocking them (as with Wikileaks donations).
I agree that a cashless society would be a bad thing, but I would be supprised if a country like the UK ever went cashless, there is the international prestiege of having a currency which is not to be sniffed at, also there are people coming from abroad with incompatible systems - you don't want to piss off your tourists!
As mark said, It gives a little too much control to the people who might want to decide that they dont want you to spend any money. Seems a little far off, but in a totally electronic, cashless society, it would be possible to 'delete' someone.
(Makes me think of idiocracy and their reaction of "Unscannable!!!")
But i would be interested to see what would happen in that society if there was a national power outage for longer than a week. Not saying its likely, but it would be interesting.
I think you hit the nail on the head: Governments will never do away with physical money, because the risks of the electronic money failing are too high. There needs to be at least some physical money, so a system for exchanging it is in place and the ability to produce more of it is still in place.
There are extensive plans held by government/the state for pretty much all disaster scenarios. Considering that the electronic money infrastructure (POS terminals, etc) is considered to be critical national infrastructure, there will be plans in place to deal with failures in it and what would be required to deal with those failures. Physical money would be the sensible option.
I've always found that the things "they" consider to be a good thing and the things I consider a good thing rarely coincide...
and I would echo the man above... why would I take cash out of account A to top account B to use as tho' it were cash, when it can stay in my account until I need it in, at which time I'll extract it as cash and spend it as actual cash... or even use that other method, my debit / credit card.
Of course, if they're saying but we'll pass the savings onto to you in cheaper inerest rates etc....
this just seems to be a answer looking for a question/problem to solve rather than anything else.
It should be the bank/card issuer but I bet it won't be. The customer is liable for any fraudulent use of their account via online banking and I can't see that changing with contactless POS technology. We didn't see that untenable shift of responsibilities coming then, but we sure are tuned into it now.
The potential suckiness won't be a technological issue, it'll be a political one.
In a regulated financial service, the provider (bank/card issuer etc) is liable for fraudulent use, unless it can be proven that the customer was the source of the fraud. The same is true for internet banking fraud.
PIN Numbers aren't enough to prove that a customer didn't have their card nicked having been shoulder surfed.
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