Ordering airline or theatre tickets by keying in your credit card details on a cellphone is open to abuse, says NEC in Japan: the vendor can easily be deceived by a crook with a forged or stolen credit card (US 2003/0014648). They may even have stolen your mobile device, too. So NEC is designing a cellphone with a built-in fingerprint reader that ensures only the rightful owner can use the mobile and verify the purchase was in fact made by them.
Users press a finger on the sensor to inject their fingerprint image into a secure memory chip. When…
