Once again we’re faced with a pile of paper receipts from our purchases, and once again we’re facing tedious and error-prone data entry as we reconcile our checkbook.
It’s 2007. Why are we still dealing in paper receipts? Mechanical cash registers are so 1870s. Computerized ones have taken their place. Why not take advantage of these computers?
A digital receipt could be provided on a customer’s USB flash drive. Or it could go on their smartchip-enabled “customer appreciation card.” The customer would take home a full, digital inventory of their purchases which could be direcly imported into their favorite checkbook application. No more poring over receipts at the end of the month, trying to figure out what’s what.
The receipts also be fed into a shopping list application, providing an easy way of keeping track of your fridge’s contents and when you’re likely to need more.
Coupons could be copied to the drive as well and redeemed the same way.
You’d never again have to wait in line while the cashier fumbled with a new roll of paper for the printer. You’d never wait for the impossibly-long paper receipt to print something you’re likely to throw away anyway.
What’s better, the digital receipt could be cryptographically signed by the store, verifying that the purchases were legitimate. In this way, these receipts would be even more secure than the paper ones, which are more susceptible to forgery.
It wouldn’t take much to make this happen. Any system would have to be backwards-compatible with existing systems (at least, to begin with). This means a terminal would have a serial or parallel port in addition to a USB port (or smartcard reader). If some modern registers use USB printers, that makes things even easier. The terminal app would take the output from the register, sign it, and copy it to the USB drive, perhaps in a CSV, XML, or some other open format. The register would never know it didn’t print to paper.
Who knows? Someday USB drives or smartcards may one day take the place of credit cards entirely. Anything would be more secure than a flimsy piece of plastic with no inherent security features.
I think I’ll take a closer look at registers in the next few days and figure out how this might work.
Most registers these days are more than capable of doing this. First thing from a retailer’s perspective would be to ensure that the customer’s drive does not infect the register. In an effort to speed up your knowledge of the modern cash register: http://www2.clearlake.ibm.com/store/support/
Thanks for the link! I’ll check it out, so to speak.
It’s a nice idea in theory, but it’s way too susceptible to fraud. It’s a variation of the e-voting versus paper ballot issue. What’s to stop a disreputable business/employee from overcharging you? The cash register display says $100, your electronic receipt says $110 (and an extra item that you never bought), and the low-life pockets $10 from the transaction. You could dispute the overcharge (if/when you eventually spot it), but the store could claim that you bought that mystery item for ten bucks.
This would also be a great way to spread spyware and viruses. The net scumbags would be drooling over the possibility of compromising thousands of cash registers and planting malware on USB keys, maybe in the guise of a coupon, freebie utility, etc.
If they can write to your flash drive, they can write just about anything they want. They can also read and erase things as well.
I like how Palm tackled this issue back in the 1990’s using IR to swap business cards, calendar entries, etc. The same thing could be done today with Bluetooth. The user permits one file to be written to the device and nothing more. No data flows back the other way.
I don’t even like using credit cards (due to all the tracking this enables) but the idea of handing over a USB thumb drive seems nucking futs to me.
It’s all for me blog, me holly jolly blog.