AccuTracking, mobilelime, TIA-Home Edition(tm)
From my blog comments re: cell-phone location-tracking-vendor uLocate: " AccuTracking.com is providing the same service for free. " That sounds so ... 90's dotcom.
http://www.mobilelime.com is offering a pay-by-cellphone service in the boston area ... you charge it up like paypal, and then speeddial their number, enter vendor code, amount, pin and hit confirm ... I think it has too many clicks compared with just handing over a credit card.
They would definitely benefit from using location information to save you a few steps in payment entry the process. I would think using location information for situations like this would go a long way towards curbing credit card fraud, in addition to facilitating one-click user experiences.
To generalize further, I think using location data you collect about yourself (including web pages you visit, and phone calls you make) would be a great way to audit your credit card usage. You could verify via these other records whether there's any way you could have made the purchase (was I in the store/visiting the web site/talking to a CSR), and flag suspect records for review in near real time. No need to wait a month til your statement arrives, or rely on the credit card vendor's fraud detection and data mining skills.
We're so close to having all this data on the desktop or available via screen scraping -- you could implement it without a privacy-killing total-information-awareness aggregation of data. Using out-of-band authentication data like this (something that spyware running on your computer or a man-in-the-middle attack couldn't mess with) holds a lot of promise ... upping the number of disparate systems that need to be compromised before someone can do you harm, without putting onerous usability requirements in place, would be a huge improvement in the state of computer security today.
4:03:11 PM
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