Credit Card Future – Reaping a Substantial Reduction in Credit Card Theft and Identity Theft Through Design

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Credit Card Future – Reaping a Substantial Reduction in Credit Card Theft and Identity Theft Through Design
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A vision from a man who grew up in the Internet Age, writes computer software and Internet systems for a living, and has visions of the future that keep him up at insane hours of the night.

How is this for a valuable service: Use a credit card as an identity card in conjunction with a PIN - not new idea, used by airline automatic ticketing machines for a number of years now. But associate more personal data with the card, but not in the card, it would be accessed from credit card company electronically from a network through an ID on card. But only authorized through a PIN typed in by the individual using the card and a dynamic ID number provided by the card itself as is postulated below.

Here is an idea for reaping a substantial reduction in credit card theft and identity theft through a simple redesign of a credit card and its associated transactions. Read on!

Have a time-based code displayed or accessible through card like the RSA cards (http://www.rsasecurity.com/node.asp?id=1156). These cards have an LCD display that display a code that changes every 60 seconds. For our purposes, this could change every five minutes and still be effective. This code would have to be typed in along with a PIN in order to complete a transaction online, or could be downloaded into a credit card reader directly from the card during in-person transactions. This would prevent credit card number theft, because you would need physical access to the card in order to use it. A hacker wouldn't be able to use credit card numbers stolen from a retail establishment's database because they wouldn't have the future time-based codes stored there. Such a system would need a stable, time accurate clock, which would not necessarily be cheap, but it would only have to be consistent for a year or two until you received your next card.

Perhaps credit card companies could use this dynamic ID technology to suppress identity theft. If RSA would give the credit card companies a volume discount, the credit card companies could use the RSA card technology as the basis of a new generation of credit card.

Until next time…

I thank God for this vision and letting me communicate it to the world.