If it made smart business sense for companies to piggyback on existing cards, they would find a way around the security concerns. And no one wants the liability of having their application depend on someone else’s infrastructure, or having their infrastructure support someone else’s application.īut security and reliability are only secondary concerns. Your airline doesn’t want your frequent-flier account to depend on a particular credit card. Your credit card company doesn’t want your ability to make purchases to disappear if you have your driver’s license revoked. So airline clubs ask for a photo ID with your membership card, and merchants want to see it when you use your credit card, but neither will replace their cards with that photo ID.Īnother reason is reliability. Everyone has different rules for card issuance, expiration and revocation, and everyone wants to be in control of their own cards. It’s the obvious next step: Why carry a driver’s license? Use your face or fingerprint.īut the truth is, neither a national ID nor a biometric system will ever replace the decks of plastic and paper that crowd our wallets.įor starters, the uniqueness of the cards provides important security to the issuers. It won’t happen either.Īnd neither will a world of biometrics. It never happened.Īnd today the most far-reaching proposals for national ID cards-including a recent South African proposal-envision a world where a single ID would be used for everything. Everyone was going to have a single digital “certificate” that would be accepted by all sorts of different applications. Those involved in computer security will remember the promise of public-key infrastructure, or PKI. Why go to the trouble and expense of issuing unique cards at all?Ī single, centralized authentication system has long been the dream of many technologists. In fact, if you forget your card, they’ll look up your account number if you give them your phone number. They could use any of your existing account numbers. Or any of the discount cards given out by supermarkets, office supply stores, hardware stores and-it seems-everyone else. The same with those airline, hotel and rental car affinity cards. Your bank could just use your driver’s license number as an account number. Why does Visa bother issuing credit cards in the first place? Clearly you don’t need the physical card in order to complete the transaction, as anyone who has bought something over the phone or the internet knows. I don’t know about your wallet, but mine contains a driver’s license, three credit cards, two bank ATM cards, frequent-flier cards for three airlines and frequent-guest cards for three hotel chains, memberships cards to two airline clubs, a library card, a AAA card, a Costco membership, and a bunch of other ID-type cards.Īny technologist who looks at the pile would reasonably ask: why all those cards? Most of them are not intended to be hard-to-forge identification cards they’re simply ways of carrying around unique numbers that are pointers into a database.
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