Christina Wood: Implications

Imagine what an advanced culture a few thousand years into the future will find when they study the civilizations of 2002. The fossil remains will include pieces of plastic with the words American Express, MasterCard, and Visa printed on them. A religious artifact? A tool? Currency?

Making the credit card a necessary part of our existence has been the goal of credit card companies for a couple of decades. And they aim to make the cards even more indispensable. One move was to merge the plastic card with microchips, creating the smart card, which can hold just about any kind of data. The concept took off in Europe and Japan, where it is almost ubiquitous, but in the U.S., it has been slow to catch on.

Globally, Visa has issued 42 million smart cards, but in the U.S. only 8.5 million. Most banks in Europe issue them, and every German citizen has a smart card for health care services. Ultimately the credit card companies will get us with the same thing they always do: convenience.

Since smart cards are essentially tiny computers, you can store your personal data on them, use them easily for online transactions, and even download applications to them. Some smart credit cards already come with free card readers you hook up to your computer. When you shop online, your payment information lies securely encrypted on your card; just swipe it through the reader.

Once a critical mass of citizens carries smart cards, there's only a small step to using them for authentication for Web sites, for travel, and perhaps even for registering software. Instead of entering cryptic, easy-to-lose, and sometimes counterfeit ID numbers for software, you would put your Visa card in your card reader to register. In fact, in late December of 2001, Visa launched the smart Visa Framework, a suite of applets and personalization requirements designed to streamline application programming for smart cards.

This means that merchants that otherwise might have found the barrier too high to justify implementing smart-card applications will be able to create programs quickly—frequent-buyer, Web site authentication, you name it—for their customers, even on a small scale.

Through Framework, developers can determine the life cycle of each application, so let's say your free-coffee punch-card program runs out and you stop going to the merchant in question; the relevant data will eventually expire from your card. It is also simple to create updates to smart-card applications after they've been issued. This all amounts to greater convenience for you and the merchants you deal with.

And when the day comes that we get a secure wireless network in these parts, you could just put your credit card into your cell phone to order goods and pay for services.

It isn't only the credit card companies that want to get us hooked on smart cards, though. There has been a lot of talk about issuing a national ID card based on a smart-card system. And in El Salvador, driver's licenses incorporate the technology. A chip on your card carries your personal driving history. If you get pulled over, the citation is added right to your license, making it much more difficult to go on an all-night vehicular crime spree.

Of course the smart-card concept raises perplexing questions of privacy for some people. But such cards will slip into our lives by getting us accustomed to the convenience. Besides, credit card data already includes an enormous amount of data on our preferences and habits. Add to that all your preferences and habits tracked by your local department store or supermarket, your gas station, your preferred airline, and even the coffee shop on the corner and that card will know more about you than your mother does.

Is that a bad thing? Is it a dangerous thing? That's hard to say. At least in the case of the smart card, the data resides in your pocket and not in a database owned by a faceless corporation. You have some control over who accesses the information. And if you don't, some developer will likely create an applet that gives you that control.

Just as when we hooked our PCs up to the Net, we will have to be vigilant about our privacy when we hook up our smart cards, too. But to be honest, I think the scheme is appealing (I'm ever one for convenience). I'm willing to risk the privacy implications as long as we all agree to cancel our cards and raise hell the minute it looks as if our rights are being invaded.

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