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However, the radio frequency antenna built into terminals from former NFL quarterbacks Drew Bledsoe and Rick
that allows smartphones to communicate with POS Mirer. But the company abruptly ceased operations in
devices in order to conduct NFC payments has a range of 2008, the casualty of internal turmoil and a faulty business
only a few inches. In this setting, the geotagging feature model.
would only work if the phone were that close to the reader,
making such a scheme impractical. "Pay By Touch tried to be a payment network – bad idea,"
Taveau said. With fraudsters focused on hacking into
But once in the cloud, geotagging takes on another large databases to steal financial information, Pay By
dimension. "When you get into geotagging, and some of Touch's method of storing consumers' fingerprint data
the other things, that's making cloud payments even more in centralized servers was a security disaster waiting to
secure than noncloud-based payments," Martin said. happen.
Untouchable "No service provider in their sane mind wants to manage
millions of fingerprint templates in the cloud or on the
But there's another argument to be made. At the NFC
conference in May, The Green Sheet asked Sebastian back end," Taveau added.
Taveau, Chief Technology Officer at biometric security
firm Validity Inc. and Chair of the technology working This gives ammunition to proponents of the device-centric
group at the FIDO Alliance, to comment on what providers philosophy, which is apparently being adopted by Apple
learned from the most prominent biometric security Inc. The tech giant's iPhone 5S, released in September
failure to date, that of Pay By Touch Inc. 2013, comes equipped with a fingerprint scanner called
TouchID. Apple stressed that fingerprint data is stored
in a secure area of the phone's A7 chip, walled off from
The now defunct company offered biometric technology
that allowed consumers to pay for purchases at the POS all other software, and untouchable even by Apple itself.
with fingerprints. At its height in the mid 2000s, Pay By However, hackers successfully accessed the secure area
Touch had installed biometric readers in 2,400 supermarket shortly after the phone's release.
locations nationally and even scored capital investments

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