Here is somewhat a futuristic idea that you may have seen in futuristic movies — the part people use fingerprints to pay for just about anything through a computer system; on a similar note, Apple is not using fingerprint but RFID technology to allow RFID-equipped iPhone acts as a credit card device, a driving license, a dot on a GPS that can be tracked down, and countless other ideas that RFID is applicable for. It sounds great and convenient, but the idea is somewhat scary. Hackers love iPhone! iPhone can be stole easily as it’s easy for you to misplace your iPhone. If hackers have a way to read and scan the RFID’s signal, iPhone’s users will be in great risk of losing their identities and confidential information. It may have come to encryption technology to save RFID from hackers.
What’s RFID? RFID has been around for decades. The Soviet Union applied an earlier form of RFID technology to a spy tool (the Great Seal bug). Quoting from Wikipedia,
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.
As technology advances, engineers can reduce the size of the RFID chips. RFID is also getting cheaper. If the rumor is true, let hope Apple smartly applies RFID in a way that makes it really hard for hackers to do their things. Source.
Vinh Nguyen
