Displaying items by tag: Google Wallet

When Apple announced their new NFC payment system it seemed the press and analysts were in nirvana. You could not open up a news site without seeing a headline on how Apple pay was going to change your life. Most of these failed to acknowledge that mobile payments (even through NFC) have existed for decades and that Google Wallet was and still is accepted at a number of locations. They were convinced that Apple pay was the way to go and they (Apple) had the future in their hands.

Ok this one goes in the books for being really foolish of Google. Remember how we told you that cutting corners in the coding of Google Wallet allowed a crafty hacker to read the binary data and get your PIN? Well today there is even worse news about the mobile payment application. The new flaw is almost a basic flaw in the OS as well as an application flaw. What’s worse is that this is so simple it does not even count as a hack… and you do not have to have a rooted phone to pull this off.

There is an old saying; buy cheap and sell dear that came about in the Carnegie days and has been in use by corporations for so long that it is just the way they do things. What this means now is that corporations will always look for the quick and easy way to do things. This is not a big shocker; after all most companies will want to minimize costs and maximize their profits. Where this hurts the consumer is that many times minimizing costs ends up being translated to security or product quality. A perfect example would be Apple’s move to Foxconn. Yes they reduced their operating costs, but the product quality realistically has gone down. Another place where we see cuts are in security and network protections of user data. A good example of this can be found in Google Wallet.