On the road to Bandol

I recently wrote about privacy, thinking about Internet in general, and a bit about mobile phones, but not really about smart cards. It did not even take a week for privacy to pop up in the smart card world, as a side discussion in a mobile payment discussion. It seems that banks don’t want mobile operators to know about their relationships with their customers. The fact is that a NFC-enabled mobile phone is something like a contactless wallet, in which all cards are dematerialized in the phone/SIM((In fact, things may be even worse, since there could be even more applications on such a phone/SIM)).

Let’s compare a few situations:

• In my present wallet, I have several cards, some with chips, some without. I easily choose the one I want, and these cards are completely separated: Carrefour does not know that I also have an Auchan card, my various payment cards do not know about each other, etc.
• If these cards become contactless, then somebody could “scan” my wallet and know a lot about its content. This is a really bad scenario, but also an unlikely one. This is technically difficult, and building a business model on such a breach of privacy would be really difficult.
• If these card are dematerialized on my mobile phone, then some people may have access to a lot of information. The mobile operator (or whoever is managing the applications) is one of them, and if I am not careful, other people may have access to it. Without regulation, privacy breaches could become the norm fairly easily.

Hopefully, competitive business relationships will help us. It seems that many stakeholders prefer to make sure that their competitors can’t benefit from information gathered in an unfair way rather than doing it themselves.

Still, we need to remain vigilant. My wallet must keep its interesting properties, even if it is dematerialized. I want to keep choosing the cards I use. I wanto to be able to hide something. I want to keep my business relationships separated. I want to limit how they can share my information. And most likely other things that I don’t think about now.