This month’s article steals the title from a snappy John Mayer ditty and is somewhat of a departure from my usual articles. I have a particular rant with regards to technology not progressing fast enough for my liking.
Usually, I’m a little bit cautious with regards to technological advances, but in a case like this, I’m a big proponent and am anxiously waiting for the advances that I believe are (or at least technically could be) around the corner.
My biggest gripe is about this authentication process of who we are. I touched on a subset of this issue with my article titled Multiple Locks - One Key but it goes beyond this.
Not only are we expected to remember passwords for the gajillion websites that we visit but where this also impacts us in our wallets. I’m referring to this literally – at how many credit cards, debit cards, customer loyalty cards and identification cards that we’re forced to carry.
It might seem like a minor issue but I know for myself personally, I am convinced that how thick my wallet is, has affected me physically. I started noticing that when I was driving longer distances that I’d be getting a pain in my right hip. I didn’t really think much of it at the time, but as the symptoms progressed I tried to figure out what was causing the pain. I came to the realization that I carry my wallet in my right rear pocket and I noticed when I was sitting that the thickness of the wallet forced my right hip to be slightly out of alignment.
As an experiment, I started carrying my wallet in a jacket pocket when driving and the symptoms seemed to be much alleviated.
This caused me to question why on earth do I need so many separate cards. Certainly technology has advanced to the degree where at least for our loyalty cards, there could be one master card and my copy of this card would link to whatever programs I belonged to.
Same thing for credit cards and government identification cards. Why do I need to have so many pieces of identification? I guess that there must be logistical or privacy reasons in some cases, but cheese and crackers – I really should be able to have less than a half dozen cards in my wallet.
One of the arguments might be that if you someone gets access to this one “master” then they have access to everything (same issue as I noted in the Multiple Locks - One Key), but where we need a physical presence to use these cards, there must be a possibility of using biometric identification such as fingerprints or retina scans to prove that the card belongs to me – it’s really not all that complicated.
I would guess that the biggest problem is that this would be an absolutely huge infrastructure change on how our data is stored and our identity is authenticated, but I’m also quite certain that in the long run it would save companies significant amounts of money with reduced manufacturing/maintenance of these cards, let alone a (theoretical) reduced fraud risk.
At present I now have TWO wallets, one that I keep with me with just the cards that I might need on a semi-regular basis and a second wallet at home with the rest of my more infrequent cards.
As a society we managed to figure out how to replace trade and barter with a cash and credit system. Surely over this period, we’re ready for that next monumental step.
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