Paying With the Wave of a Cellphone 137
holy_calamity writes "Tech Review discusses how it will soon be possible to pay in stores by waving your cellphone over a contactless reader, thanks to new handsets due next year, and RFID stickers and cases offered today by firms including Visa. It's convenient for shoppers, but a major driver of the technology is the opportunity for retailers to gain access to their customers' cellphones and social networks for marketing purposes."
Re:Let's just implant RFID chips in our hands (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old people already use that in Japan (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mark of the beast! (Score:3, Informative)
Or we could say it already happened, if we take the "mark" to be credit. To participate in modern society, one has to have a credit history. It's very difficult to live a cash-only life - things like buying a house often require borrowing money (there aren't too many people who can drop the cash to buy a house - and if you can, you probably are smart enough to figure out that it can be more lucrative to keep the cash in investments and borrow the amount). So you need a mortgage, and lenders often jack up the interest rate to those without credit histories.
And with employers wanting access to credit histories, as well as insurers and the like, well, it seems to live one must have a credit history.