Are there any downsides of mobile contactless payment?

It kills your battery life

Anyone, who has a smartphone which they use day in and day out, will know about the fundamental limitations of battery life. This is a problem when using power hungry apps and anything on your phone which uses processing power like 4G. We are also all familiar with that sinking realisation that your battery is not going to last the day (or night). For this reason, it is unlikely in the near future, that your phone will ever be the sole method of payment you have with you. Who wants the dilemma of having to decide whether to use their remaining battery power to pay for a round of drinks or call a cab at the end of the evening.

Lest we forget! – it’s actually a phone…

Sometimes you will even want to use it as one! Imagine rushing into a shop, phone pressed to your ear as you fumble around for a card or cash to pay for a coffee or a newspaper. If you need to use the phone to pay, do you hang up your call, to open your payment app and complete your transaction? Perhaps not, but it is begging to look a little less convenient when you want to use your phone for its primary purpose!

It’s a really expensive mobile phone Wallet!

When you consider the cost of your mobile phone and the extent to which you put it at risk, making small payments with it really doesn’t make a lot of sense! Many mobile phones cost several hundreds of pounds and we are now in the era of the £1,000 mobile phone. Because of the ever increasing value and desirability of handsets, we are also in the era of increased mobile phone theft with, snatch theft becoming a problem in some major cities like London. The Metropolitan Police have issued advice for guarding against handset theft and it mostly involves “keeping your phone out of sight and not using your phone in busy public places.” The examples they give are stations, concert venues and shopping centres – all the places where being able to make quick, convenient payments may be of benefit.

Aside from the risk of having your handset stolen, you also run the risk of dropping or damaging your phone if you have to keep taking it in and out of your pocket to make payments.

 Mobile payments: our conclusion

For the time being at least, we still prefer not to use a phone handset to routinely make payments. Contactless cards, whilst having some vulnerabilities in terms of security, make much more sense as a lower risk quick and easy payment method.

There are many solutions for protecting contactless cards and reducing contactless payment risks, however, we consider that RFID contactless blocking cards are the one of the most effective.

‘Want to know more about RFID cards protection? We have prepared a detailed description of this technology.

Updated in June 2020

The post Are mobile payments secure? A cashless future appeared first on RFID Cloaked - Protecting your RFID personal data.

Biometric and passcode logins should protect the user from unintentionally making any sort of payments. Safe from criminals and those trying to access your accounts. Therefore your bank details and cash should be secure.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case, smartphones are only as good as the programmers and developers who code the systems for the phone and bank companies. Any holes in these system can lead hackers and criminals to take control of these systems and in essence have full access to your data and information stored in the modern devices.

Is pay by phone safe? Google Pay and Apple Pay: is your data safe?

Day to day we are hearing stories in the news about international companies and even national security agencies being hacked. Criminals having access to databases, passwords emails and login details. Smartphones are no different in many respects. The weakest links are always the humans that build the operating systems and applications.

Keeping up with the latest security implementations and best practises seems to be too much for many companies. A badly coded authorised login is implemented on almost all internet connected devices, from a universally used websites. It allows access to information stored within the app. If that app is hotel books with stored card information, in theory criminals could book rooms in your name. What if via the app they get access to all your card details? The risks are all still there. Even once the loophole has been closed as criminals are always looking for ways to gain people’s confidence. They can gain access to accounts or use in email phishing attacks to further attack computers or users devices.

What can you do to protect your data?

It is quite simple to ensure data protection security. Data protection and data security are provided by the following steps:

• You have to use unique passwords for all websites and logins.
• You have to keep device and computer security and operating system up-to-date.

Where possible

• Use encrypted data sites.
• Two factor authentication (another layer of protection like Google authenticator. Even if your password is stolen, your data is safe and encrypted without this second key).
• Only login to websites using HTTPS.

Never

• Use email links to login to websites, unless you are completely sure it is from the right website.

‘Do you want to learn more about the risks of using contactless payments? For more information, see the article.

Updated in June 2020

The post Is it safe to pay with Google Pay and Apple Pay? appeared first on RFID Cloaked - Protecting your RFID personal data.