Intellectual Property Law

RFID-Enabled Phones Could Let Credit Card Companies Track Users

By Kim Zetter

An Ericsson executive says all new mobile phones sold in 2010 will include an RFID chip that will allow owners to open their car or house door with their phone. A handy feature, no doubt, for some people. But the executive says the chip might also be used by credit card companies to track the location of cardholders to cut down on fraud.

Håkan Djuphammar, vice president of systems architecture for Ericsson, speaking at a conference in Stockholm this week, said credit card companies could make use of mobile user location data and IP mapping to determine if the owner of a card is in the same location where a card transaction is taking place.

“In some countries there’s a lot of fraud with credit cards so therefore it’s in the interest of the credit card issuer to be able to match the position of the phone that belongs to the person who has a credit card,” he reportedly said.

He said the chips could also be used to create real-time traffic maps and updates by determining the speed of a driver passing by mobile phone base stations.

Djuphammar said selling the information of mobile phone users to credit card companies and others would be a “win win” situation for all parties concerned.

“That is a typical ‘win win’ where the operator share their assets/knowledge through a broker, and the GPS company can sell a service to the end user. The end user wins, the GPS service provider wins, the broker provider wins and the operator wins,” he said.

Djuphammar did not mention whether users will be able to turn the chip off or otherwise opt out of the sale of their data.

Photo: KB35/Flickr

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).