Gratiscard
posted by:Jeremy Hessing-Lewis // 08:53 AM // April 05, 2007 // Digital Identity Management | General
In the world of digital cash, not all news is bad news for privacy researchers. The Economist has an article April 4th detailing the emergence of a new generation of payment cards to give Visa and Mastercard a run for their money (pun intended). Among them is Gratiscard, a system that can be used as Credit, Debit, or Prepaid and can be used anonymously:
Taking aim at both of these flaws is GratisCard, a new payments system backed by Steve Case, the founder of AOL, launched later this month. The card, which can function as a debit, credit or prepaid card, is entirely anonymous. A thief who steals one will not find a customer's name or account number on it, nor will a hacker find anything to decode in the card's magnetic strip. Instead, customer data are stored in GratisCard's data centre in Florida and sent to the till only as needed. GratisCard will be the first to use the internet to zip data among merchants and banks. This allows it to side-step the big payment networks and their stiff interchange fees. Merchants that accept GratisCard simply pay a processing fee capped at 0.5% of a transaction.
