Is the concept of consolidating your wallet into one card too young to prosper? Coin is hoping to bring its consolidated credit card solution to the mainstream, addressing early security concerns for this system that stores all your information in a single locale.

It has only been two weeks since Coin, a startup that aims to become your credit card-sized digital wallet, hit its initial pre-sale goal. The Coin card is designed to replace credit, bank, gift, and loyalty cards by letting users scan them into a single device that syncs with a smartphone. As a Coin user, you have the ability to scan-in all of your cards, and then flip through them with a single button.

When shopping, you can both hand it to a cashier or swipe it yourself, like a normal credit card acting as any one of the stored cards you have on Coin. But as big of a win for consumer storage as Coin sounds, there are some obvious immediate security concerns. Having all of your sensitive information stored on one ‘card’ isn’t so much different than having all of your credit and bank cards in your wallet, does it? Cash is still king, but are consumers moving away from storing their cash in banks and now storing them on Coin cards and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin?

Will your money become useless if your smartphone dies? Can a cashier or waiter accidentally hit the button on the way to the register and swipe the wrong card? Can Coin owners secretly steal your credit cards and scan then into their own Coin and start using? Coin hasn’t answered all of the rising security concerns yet, but here are Coin’s responses so far:

Q. What happens if my smartphone dies?
A. The company plans to add a button to the Coin card so users can reactivate it even if their phone is dead and temporarily unpair the card. Users will be able to tap a button in a “Morse-code-like” fashion.

Q. Can someone accidentally change which card is selected on my Coin?
A. We’ve designed the button to toggle cards in a way that makes it difficult to trigger a “press” unintentionally. Dropping a Coin, holding a Coin, sitting on a Coin, or putting the Coin in a check presenter at a restaurant will not inadvertently toggle the card that is selected.

Q. What steps does the Coin app take to prevent cards from being added fraudulently?
A. The Coin app requires that you take a picture of the front and back of the card, type in card details, and then swipe the card (using a reader we provide) to ensure the card’s encoded magnetic stripe data matches the card details provided. It is not possible to complete these steps unless you are in physical possession of a card. As an additional safeguard, the Coin app will only allow you to add cards you own.

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Carriers reject ‘kill switch’, cite security concerns

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As mobile devices, from smartphones to smart credit cards, proliferate throughout the economy as central accounts for consumers, security becomes an increasingly serious matter.  An astounding 1 in 3 U.S. robberies involve phone theft, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Furthermore, lost and stolen mobile devices cost consumers more than $30 billion last year, according to a study cited by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this past June.

It stands to reason that a ‘kill switch’ would make mobile device theft a less lucrative market, right? But carriers aren’t on board. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said last week that AT&T, Verizon Wireless, U.S. Cellular, Sprint. and T-Mobile US rebuffed Samsung’s proposal to preload its phones with Absolute LoJack anti-theft software as a standard feature.

This all begs the question as to why carriers rejected the proposed ‘kill switch’ on mobile phones, when the feature could be so beneficial to users.  Is it because they can make more money selling more phones to theft victims? That’s certainly one theory, but the carriers themselves are citing security concerns behind the rejection of a ‘kill switch’.

In June, CTIA, the industry trade group that represents the carriers, said in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission that “a kill switch isn’t the answer.”

CTIA said that a kill switch would pose risks, because hackers who took control of the feature could disable phones for customers, including the phones used by officials in the Department of Defense and law enforcement.

The trade group added that if a phone were deactivated and the customer later retrieved it, he or she could not reactivate it. That claim is not true in the case of Apple’s new antitheft feature, Activation Lock, which allows a customer to disable a phone that has been lost, and, after it has been found, reactivate it with the correct username and password.

WD debuts world’s first SSD+HDD dual drive

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In other consumer storage news, WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the release of the WD Black(2) dual drive, a unique storage innovation that fuses a 2.5-inch 120 GB solid state drive (SSD) with a 1 TB hard disk drive (HDD). Designers and PC gamers alike are going to love the WD Black(2) dual drive’s improved overall drive capacity, performance, and reliability. But the true kicker is the flexibility to choose how and where their data is stored.

By coupling the benefits of both flash and magnetic disks, WD Black(2) dual drives are able to offload data usage from the SSD to the HDD. Users are able to have a much tighter grip on data control while extending the life of the SSD and can eliminate the need of cloud-base storage altogether.

Coin image credit

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