Providing secure payments and protecting the privacy of an
individual’s personal data is critical to the growth of mobile ecommerce,
also known as m-commerce. M-commerce may
someday provide a true alternative to cash and make purchasing
items as easy as hitting a few keys on the keypad of your
Wireless Internet device.
One of the most important issues to overcome in the area
of m-commerce is fraud. It’s easy enough to prove payment in
the physical world—cash works well and credit cards have
sophisticated protection schemes to protect both the holder
and the merchant from unauthorized use. Over the Internet,
it’s quite a bit harder to confirm the identity of the entity that
is attempting to complete a purchase—merchants are unable
to ask for a photo ID or some other proof that the identity of
the person requesting the purchase is correct.
One solution may be biometric identification. Biometrics
involve the use of technology that can identify unique attributes
of an individual, such as a fingerprint or a scan of the
face, to be presented as proof of identity. The user might
have a fingerprint scanner built into their Wireless Internet
device. This scanned image would be transmitted to the merchant,
who would check it against a secure database of fingerprints.
If the user has registered in this database, and the
information matches, the merchant would allow the purchase
to proceed.