I saw a preview of this on BBC Click. The card has a fingerprint reader and will not work wirelessly unless the correct finger is pressed against the reader. The idea is to make contactless payment more secure so that the current £50 transaction limit can be raised. According to the people trialling it, it does not respond to photographs or prints, only to a real finger.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I never use my card contactless because I don't feel safe doing so, without even a PIN to prove it's really me. I understand that ill-intentioned people with nfc readers can skim data off the card unless you keep it in a metal wallet, but they can't skim off the PIN because that's securely encrypted. Would biometrics be the answer?

I don't think this is true. An NFC reader can talk to the chip embedded in the card, but it's not like the magnetic strip that just holds some passive data. It should be performing some crypographic protocol that doesn't divulge any info.

The thing about biometrics, is that they're kind of like passwords that aren't really secret (e.g., you leave fingerprints on everything you touch) and are very difficult to change. It's okay for identification, not authentication.

I was recently following a discussion about biometrics in general; how institutions & companies promise that they won't store that data anywhere, but then they do it anyway.

Some giant databse got hacked in Korea, Millions of sets of biometric data got leaked. The affected people are scarred for life, and NOTHING can fix that anymore.

Apart from that I don't think it's so bad; provided it's implemented safely (yeah, that's a big BUT).

My bank will supply a contact only (ie insert chipped part of card into merchant's machine) on request. The only down side is losing the ability to mimic a credit card with a debit card, which IMO is a small price to pay to get away from the risk of wireless card skimming. Maybe ask your bank about it?

Sounds safe, but then again I can't get THAT scene from Demolition Man out of my mind.

Stallone ?. People actually watch Stallone movies ??? Damn, now I gotta go find it, to see what this is all about ...

That's exactly what I did. I told them to put a note against my name that if they ever found any contactless payments apparently made with that card, they should contact me because it wasn't me that made them.

Or you could just take the imdb.com shortcut... but it does have some humour between the violence.