Wired News: Chameleon Card Changes Stripes
March 5, 2004 - 12:17pm — bmann
I have been thinking about this concept for years! It's great that some ideas are finally coming to pass.
Chameleon Network, in Concord, Massachusetts, plans to replace the stacks of credit, bank and customer-loyalty cards burdening modern consumers with a single, rewritable Chameleon Card, which works just like an ordinary card with a magnetic strip.
Unfortunately, the device is expensive ($200US), and requires the use of a special "Pocket Vault" which reprograms the card on the fly. It does use fingerprint recognition to allow access, but replacing a wallet full of cards with one card and a wallet-sized electronic device might be too clumsy.
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Comments
identification and authentication
All we need to do (I think) is separate identification from authentication. Knowing my credit card number, for instance, shouldn't be enough to let you run up big charges, and knowing my Social Insurance number shouldn't let you get new id in my name. After id issuers realized this, then we could use one id card for everything.
as we type...
the card industry is putting a PIN infrastructure in place to address this prob.
But i still wouldn't want cards centralized in any fashion, no point making it easy for anyone to correlate personal info at a mass scale.
What I liked about this syste
What I liked about this system was that it was completely user run and stand alone. The cards are yours and the card programmer is yours -- all other systems work as they currently work, just as if you had the individual cards.
as the Risks Forum wud say...
lose one, lose them all?
crackers' dream card?
who do you want to be today?
"...stores all your card information internally and backs it up to an online or local database in case the Pocket Vault is lost or stolen"