Download Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica

CAFE PROJECT
Hong Kong road pricing, with electronic number plates, is reported to have been scrapped
because of the privacy issue (Heusch et al. 1991, Financial Times of 27.7.1990).
There is, however, a conflict of requirements within pre-pay card schemes. The issuer wants to be able
to protect his system against organised or individual attack from forged cards and dummy terminals, so
most build in a means to identify individual or groups of cards. Scheme providers assured us that they
would only use this information to block fraudulent cards or transactions and not track an individual
customer. Identified examples of where the privacy issues are considered important are:
Some providers of pre-pay card schemes are considering deleting most of the records e.g. Swiss
PTT in Biel, transport in Germany and possibly, the French La Poste. This is, at least in part, a
result of the perceived privacy issue.
The UK department of transport considers that road pricing schemes should protect the
motorists' privacy.
For cellular phones, consumers perceive an invasion of privacy resulting from the use of radio
scanners in North America (Beatty 1992). GSM in addition to providing better voice quality, is
designed to reduce this threat.
2.1.5
Operational Issues
Usage
Off-line capability for pre-pay card processing is seen as essential for cardholders, card issuers and
retailers for small value transactions. It may be that for higher value transactions the cardholder is
verified and for extremely high transactions an on-line connection is made.
Where user verification is needed, (recharging a pre-pay card from the user's bank account for
example), then if a PIN is used it should be customer-alterable. For small value transactions users find
it quite acceptable not to use a PIN (Loughborough, PTT's worldwide).
Usage is said to increase when consumers are given the opportunity to use a signature, in place of a
PIN (MasterCard trials, Peek & Cloppenburg [Germany], UK experience). This suggests that some of
the biometric techniques which are currently being tested, (e.g. the fingerprint based system at
Schiphol airport and the hand geometry approach at Newark and JFK airports in the USA) might be
more appropriate in the future.
The man-machine interface for a multi-application card can be very complex. In a number of
applications these functions are implemented by using different attributes of the card (i.e. chip,
magnetic stripe or indeed embossing). This maybe alright if the application can only use one of the
alternatives, but what, if there is a choice (for example a payphone that takes pre-pay off the chip and
credit calls off the magstripe). Inevitably different service providers indicate options in different ways.
In situations were operator assistance is available (at the POS for example), then the retailer can lead
the consumer through the options. Where no assistance is available then the customer interface needs to
be explicit and unambiguous, a tall order especially if the user is in a foreign country. There are good
examples of ATM's especially in Spain and Switzerland, which display the operating instructions in the
language of the cardholder.
CAT5363
9