As advanced as the Germans are, they are not early adopters of digital tech. They are also supremely concerned about privacy and security which leads to a lot of anxiety around online banking and identity theft. This anxiety has become the mother to a single-purpose invention I found my father-in-law (FIL) using a few months back:
This one amazed me. It looks like a cheap calculator but it contains both a card reader and optical scanner and its purpose is to generate a one-time password (OTP) to validate the transaction. To use it, my FIL inserted his physical bank card and then initiated the transaction on the bank’s website. The site then displayed a code in the form of 6 blinking squares and my FIL had to hold the reader up to his monitor with the blinking code between the two triangles at the top of the reader. He was then asked to confirm the amount on this gizmo and it promptly spat out an OTP which he used to complete the transaction. And then, Voila! Three days later the money was moved. I won’t get into the absurdity that is ACH.
The first thing this ‘technology’ made me think of was Duck Hunt on the original Nintendo, which was released in 1984 and is therefore nearly as old as I am. The gun controller for that game worked in the same way as this card reader: When you pulled the trigger to shoot, the screen went black everywhere except for a white box around the duck. The gun was the receiver and if it saw white it registered a hit, otherwise it was a miss. This banking security device is exactly the same thing and is therefore using technology that is about 40 years old.
The purpose of this device is to tie together the online and physical worlds and its existence implies that there is somehow more security by having one foot in each. But is that really true? I’d like to know how much fraud is prevented by adding this ridiculous middle man. We can think of multiple ways in which this can be spoofed or otherwise rendered useless but is it really adding any value? I genuinely have no idea so I’d love to learn more if anyone knows.
