McDonalds Implementing NFC? Pay and Pray

Near Field Communications. The act of using an electronic device to gather information you provide, and feed it to the vendors payment system.

We have been reading about the technology for quite a while and now McDonalds has announced they will begin equipping more then 1000 of their UK stores with NFC Swipe and Pay technology in the next few months.

Now RFID, and NFC and other technologies are wonderful ideas. Unfortunately we do not yet have the security tech to adequately guard our information from deliberate attack. The risks involved in a the McDonalds experiment may be acceptable but they should be considered, tying monetary value to an invisible signal is still quite chancy.

Starbucks has also introduced a new way to pay in the form of an iOs App that displays a barcode which the user then swipes over the kiosk reader when picking up his new Trenta. This type of  system has been used successfully in the UK for over a year in various transportation payment systems such as busses or trains.

I predict that there will be adequate security measures to keep the new NFC system relatively secure, but I believe it will come at the expense of perceived convenience over plastic. I also think we will have a much more robust biometrics system in the near future, at which time these NFC systems will be much more widely excepted.