Right now, with the touchID iphones and whatever the Android equivalent is, it is now possible to use the phone as a form of identification, as a payment method, and as a key for your houseor car.
Nifty stuff. But what’s the most common form of failure for a smartphone? Either it takes enough damage to crack the screen and/or the edges of the case, or the battery fails or runs out of juice.
That makes the device a lot less reliable than the metal keys you carry now, or that plastic ID card in your wallet, or your plastic credit cards.
Would be nice if you really could leave all that stuff behind and just carry your phone.
As near as I can tell, there’s just one missing piece. The phone itself needs inductive receiver coils that can partially power the device. Maybe not enough juice to start the display or run the OS stack, but enough to power up the secure element co-processor and run the fingerprint sensor.
That way, you would be able to verify your identity (the police officer would have an inductive charger as part of his smartphone’s case or in his patrol car), pay for things (the payment terminals would include inductive chargers), or unlock your house or car (the locks in your house or car would similarly send power from the host device).
Other needed features are :
A secure way to replace your entire phone if the hardware is destroyed or lost that will mean the new phone inherit’s the old one’s security access.
The payment architecture needs to be platform agnostic so that it can be adopted universally. Apple Pay is Apple only, and a competing architecture (CurrentC) has limited fraud protection.
And, one final note. Those electronic door locks for your house use batteries. That’s no good. It needs to be wired to the house power (with a backup battery at most). Maybe the door locks could be installed in the door frame itself, or use inductive power transfer from the door frame?
Wait, I have smoke alarms that run on batteries. Sure, it would be nicer if they were wired to the house and had battery backups, but they work just fine. If something as important as a smoke alarm functions just fine on batteries, I think you’re overestimating the problems of having (for example) door locks also run on battery power.
Smoke alarms aren’t important, relatively speaking. The average smoke alarm would only be triggered once every 300 years, which both means that their batteries will discharge only very slowly and that even if the battery does go flat, the odds are that it will not matter. A door lock is used much more often and has to do enough work to secure the door against somebody trying to open it, and not merely make an audible sound.
My first thought is: what happens when you lose your phone?
I’m not anti-technology, but I do wonder about the wisdom of consolidating so many things into one device. As it is, we no longer remember phone numbers because we don’t have to, so when our phone goes away, we’re unable to call anyone for help, right? So now we can’t get into our houses either? Or even pay for a cab to take us to the house that we can’t get into?
Then again, I have a basic dumb phone - I can make calls and receive calls, and if I want to fuss with using the number pad, I can send a text. If I lose it, I’ll need a new cheapie phone assigned to my number. Inconvenient, but not a major big deal. Short of a purse snatcher, what are the chances I’ll misplace my phone and my keys and my wallet all at the same time?
As of right now, I think most people only use their phone as a payment device as a novelty. I used it that way a few times and it was way more of a hassle that I found it way easier to just use my credit cards (same pocket, way less messing around) that I never bothered setting up the app again when I lost it. I’ve never known anyone to use their cell phone as an ID and I know there’s some insurance places that let you use it as your insurance card, but I think that’s a terrible idea. Personally, I don’t like the idea of handing my entire smart phone over to a police officer to have while he’s sitting in his car doing, who knows what, with it. What if he picks though it and finds something incriminating on it (of even just embarrassing).
Having said that, you can pick up things like this that will charge your cell phone for you. I don’t know how long they hold a charge, but at least you’ll have a back up. Also, if you’re entire life is on your cell phone, it seems the responsibility is on you to make sure you leave the house every morning with a fully charged battery and don’t drain it playing games or music.
For the battery operated locks, I’ve never looked at those, but maybe a nice addition would be if they created some kind of temporary way to put a battery in from the front, just to get it unlocked once in those cases where you chose to ignore the weeks of warnings that the battery was going to die. The problem with adding any kind of mains wiring to this is that the typical homeowner won’t be able to install them on their own and not only will they go from being $100 to $200, you’ll have to add in the cost of an electrician or handyman. You’re better off just making sure one door has a regular lock or hoping they don’t all die at the same time.
For smoke detectors, they do ask that you change the battery once a year, which is probably about 5 years before it’ll actually die, plus they chirp if the battery gets low. They also have ones at Home Depot with permanent batteries that are supposed to last 10 years and then you replace the entire unit. There’s also plenty of smoke/fire detectors that wire right into your mains. The nice thing about those ones is that they talk to each other. If one goes off, they all go off.
This one has already got me. I used to remember a lot of numbers but… :smack:
Other than 911, trying to use a strangers phone to call a friend for help when all I knew was his first name, (riding buddy who might be available to help) did not work so well. :rolleyes:
Maybe a business card with important numbers would be good to have copies of stashed in my wallet & in/on vehicles… Hummm :dubious:
If it’s an Android phone, (and your buddy has a smart phone) you can try logging into Gmail account. Some/all of your contacts should be stored there and you may be able to find them. All your Android stuff (contacts, apps you’ve downloaded, where your phone has been) is all stored on the Google Cloud so you can access it remotely, but, at least to me, it’s not all that easy to navigate, but it is there and you can find it.
Just found it. Log into Gmail, at the top left, under the word GOOGLE, you’ll see GMAIL with a little drop down arrow, click that and select Contacts and all the contacts from your phone are right there.
I’d be willing to guess that if it’s an iPhone, all your contacts are in iTunes.
All the examples listed in the op use passive communication so there’s no worry about not being able to pay or open a door because your phone’s dead. It’s the reading device that needs to be powered.
As for losing your phone, if payment is tied to a credit card, you would do the same thing you would if you lost that; notify the carrier/bank so they can put it on hold until it’s found or officially lost. In fact, if you notify the carrier, they can take the SIM off-line and your phone will not be able to be used at all.
If you pay with your phone using something like SoftCard, the phone needs to be actually up and running for it to work, if uses NFC, not RFID (plus you need to get the app loaded up, punch in your PIN and select the card you want to use). As for door locks, some use bluetooth linked to your phone, but even if they use an RFID chip in your pocket or a pad on the door, they still require battery on door portion of the lock which is what the OP was talking about being dead. If that’s dead, the bolt isn’t going to retract.
I don’t know what SoftCard is, but if you need to open an app to use it, then having a working phone is a given. But that’s a limitation of the service, not NFC/RFID.
As for door locks, the mechanism to open the lock needs to be powered, not the IC-integrated key.
What does that have to do with the battery life of an electronic lock?
I read that the batteries in an electronic deadbolt are recommended for replacement every 12-18 months. Compared to the considerable expense, even in a new installation, of running power to entry doors, batteries seem to me to be a very logical solution. I’ll also add that my thermostats also rely on batteries, which are changed about once a year or so, and that’s no problem at all.
On to the OP’s criticism of using smartphones:
As I understand it, my new iPhone 6 stores my credit card info. If the phone is lost or stolen, I just need to make a call to have the card disabled. That’s really no different than if my wallet is lost or stolen. And if I get a new iPhone 6, I just put my credit card info back into it, just like I’d put a new credit card into a physical wallet. I’m calling this “problem” a wash, except that a new wallet costs $20 and a new iPhone not under contract is probably like $600.
On platform agnosticity, I’ve used my iPhone this week at several credit card swipe stations. The merchant must be somehow connected to the proper network and have a NFC terminal for the customer to use. I’m no expert on this, but it seems that if a merchant has a terminal that displays this symbol, I’m 90% of the way there for using my phone to pay. Even at this early date for these types of payments, it seems like this criticism doesn’t seem to be a real-life concern. Seems to me like the major hurdle is whether merchants have the proper equipment for the customer to use NFC payments, whether they are from an iPhone, Google Wallet, or another PayPass enabled thing.
The phone’s software state is digital. Even the state of the encryption co-processor is digital, though for security reasons you want to limit how many backups of that you make.
This means backups are easily made.
Right now, if you lose your wallet, you have to go get another driver’s license, cancel and reorder each credit card individually, get new ID cards for whatever else you have, and so on.
If you lose your phone, if you can prove you are you (the tricky part), the device manufacturer or a third party could rush you a replacement phone with exactly the same software state and security credentials.
One overnight express shipment later, it’s like your never lost it, and you’d send a remote kill command to brick the old one. (this mostly works right now with iCloud)
Sure, there’s the 600 upfront cost : but the actual manufacturing cost is about 227.
The phone manufacturer could offer replacement phones at cost, so long as you agree to them sending a remote kill command to permanently destroy the old one.
I’m looking “15 minutes” into the future here. All of the technology to do everything I have described exists, except that as of right now, it isn’t all integrated or in common use.
I have electronic door locks. Not the fancy kind that interface to a phone, but just have a keypad so I don’t need to routinely carry a key.
You might be surprised to find that the engineers who designed the thing thought about the situation of the battery (9v) running down.
It has a conventional key hole & key that can be used if the battery is dead. Such a key lives in the trunk of my car along with other emergency supplies.
It beeps and lights up warning lights when operated when the battery is low. This warning state lasts weeks, not days or hours.
the battery doesn’t extend or retract the deadbolt; that function is mechanical when you rotate the deadbolt handle like a traditional deadbolt. The electric part is a small solenoid that engages a bar into a keyway to clutch the external handle to the interior mechanism. The incremental power consumption per use is trivial even for a 9V.
I would not recommend installing these locks on all doors of a place you only visit every year or so. But for a residence or office used at least weekly there’s essentially zero concern about an unexpectedly dead battery. In terms of lock-out risk, I’d be at least as worried about vandals sticking gum or glue in the keyway of a traditional lock.
