By next year, all cell phones will include an RFID chip that can access the owner's car, home and credit card, says a vice president at Sony Ericsson.
"A year from now, basically every new phone sold will have [near field communication]," Håkan Djuphammar said at the company's Business Innovation Forum in Stockholm, ZDNet reports. "It's a two-way, bio-directional RFID communication link that makes this device work as a tag or reader."
Djuphammar, who is Sony Ericsson's vice president of system architecture, explained that this technology could include "secure elements" or "trusted identities" that act as house and car keys, credit cards or concert tickets. For now, Ericsson is working with a utiliies company to reduce the need for 15,000 keys by replacing them with RFID-enabled mobile devices.
Over time, consumers could take advantage these functions. Djuphammar said RFID could provide added security by checking whether the owner of a credit card is physically nearby, reducing instances of fraud. Another use could be real-time traffic data based on a user's speed and direction. Djuphammar calls these services a "win-win" because new revenue is created through the sale of services from operator to GPS company to end-user.
No thanks. The obvious concern is privacy, but I'm particularly surprised to see no mention of security issues in ZDNet's report. Cell phones are easily lost, and I'm not keen on having the key to my home on the same device that could potentially be storing my address. Beyond that, I've been weary of RFID ever since reading a 2006 Wired article about tag theft.
If Sony Ericsson are only talking about the positives of RFID without addressing potentially major security flaws, Houston, we've got a problem.
