Sunday November 8, 2009
The price of convenience
Contradictheory
By DZOF AZMI
Digital money is extremely convenient to have, but should a private company have details about how you spend your money?
WHEN I was told I had to replace my Touch ‘n Go card (it seems they only work for 10 years), I surprised that a e-cash utility had to be replaced manually by filling in a form. Even more surprising was the fact that I couldn’t transfer the balance over to my new card, and whatever remaining amount would have to be sent to me in a cheque.
At first, I was quite upset at the irony of the situation and that I had to wait for so long, but after reading up about it, I realised I was really lucky. Touch ‘n Go didn’t actually have to give me any money at all.
According to the company’s terms and conditions on its website (tinyurl.com/yh5xtlb), if a card is cancelled, the balance will be returned in 30 days. But the company can also cancel a card at any time for any reason whatsoever (as they did with my card) – and the terms stay silent on whether it must pay you back.
This is especially galling since I had loaded a lot of money into the card, and it was like giving cash away without knowing if I could get it back. This is arguably worse than giving your Personal Identification Number to a prince from Nigeria who wants to borrow your bank account.
I’m assured by friends who are lawyers and bankers that I can probably claim the credit if the company tried to suspend my card. I did get my money in the end after I made an appeal at the KL Sentral office, and I was lucky that the kind manager on duty managed to reload the extra value to my new card on the next working day.
Despite this misgiving, I think that Touch ‘n Go is a product that works well. It is the closest thing that we have to digital money in Malaysia in terms of small-value transactions (more than four million users in the country with a million transactions per day). There are other contactless payment cards like Visa Wave and Mastercard Paypass which are associated with credit card companies but they require an existing account with a partner bank for them to work.
Digital money is an extremely convenient thing to have. Transactions are generally faster, and you don’t have to carry bulky coins in your pocket. There are savings for merchants as well, since the money will eventually get deposited into their account via digital means, and they don’t have to lug the cash to the bank.
Judging by the success of the Octopus transport card in Hong Kong (it’s virtually the same type of system as Touch ‘n Go), it’s very possible for something that was initially intended to simplify transport payment to blossom into something that is used more widely. It could easily become a de facto national standard for all electronic payment.
Touch ‘n Go also has other features you may not be aware of. You can log into its website and see a record of where you used the card and print it out for receipt purposes.
However, if the card is to be used for more than toll payment, will you be comfortable with a private company knowing so much detail about how you spend your money? Somewhere out there will be a permanent record of the burger you bought from the shopping mall, after you had told your boss you were too ill to go to work.
This is not much different from a lot of things we do from day to day in our modern connected world. Gmail for example holds all your email. This is convenient when you need to check what you sent two years back, but what will you do if Google decides that they will terminate your email account?
As I see it, there are only two things you can really do about it. The first is that you have to take control of your own personal information. For things like email, it means that you need to keep a copy. For your e-cash, you limit your risk by only putting what you can afford to lose in the card (the ability to reclaim credit from a lost card notwithstanding).
The second thing you need to protect is the integrity and the privacy of your own personal information. Apart from keeping passwords safe, it also means that the terms and conditions of the application you use have to be on your side. You have to make sure that the company will be liable if they expose your data to some unauthorised third party.
This is not something an individual citizen can do on his own. Some countries have Data Protection Acts to safeguard privacy. Malaysia’s version is due to be up and running by early 2010. A draft has been in the works for the last decade or so. As any e-cash system needs to fall under the purview of Bank Negara, hopefully this issue can be tackled by its guidelines as well.
The likelihood is that none of these shortcomings will be a barrier to most people when they decide whether to use e-cash or not. In this always-on, always-now digital age, long-term issues are blurred for most people, And if someone takes your money away from you – well, I guess that’s the price we have to pay for convenience.
Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make of life’s vagaries and contradictions.
Source:
RSS
