Online Membership Apps/Cards

[PaulSB]

A little unsure where to post this - here or Cycling Clubs. On balance this is the place for hopefully better exposure to the question.

My cycling club issues each member with a plastic credit card sized membership card each year. The members can use this to obtain local and national discounts. There are issues surrounding the cards which I won't bore people with.

There are apps available which create a membership card which individuals can then open on their phones. These come with a lot of benefits for our club admin.

I wondered if anyone has experienced such an app as a member user. Obviously this can be for any club, organisation etc.

 

[steveindenmark]

The app sounds a better idea than a plastic card and it is more secure.

 

[Pat "5mph"]

Well, sounds like your Tesco Clubcard app.
Or, at a push, not really an app but works fine, the BC or CTC codes you need to present on your phone to obtain your discounts.
Ime, no problems.
Also, got concert tickets on my phone in an app, no hard copy issued.
It's the way forward it seems.

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good morning,

It is just possible that I am at the Luddite end of the spectrum. :-)

I have no apps on my phone (I had a few and found them annoying and insecure) and it spends almost as much time at home as a landline phone, so if I were a member of the OP's club I would be asking for the physical card to stay. This would be a lot of hassle for the club if half of the members were like me.

Although not really an issue with a club loyalty card I was stunned by the recent Samsung Galaxy Fingerprint scanner news.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50080586
https://news.samsung.com/global/statement-on-fingerprint-recognition-issue

As the technology is so useful most people will forget about it within a few days, but in other circumstances it would be a technology ending event.

I have an iPhone and banking apps were quite happy to use the finger print scanner for account authorisation.

I am a Three user and was slightly inconvenienced by the recent outage but no more than that because I don't use my phone for any critical tasks other than making phone calls. I expect it to be unreliable.

Also I am generally paranoid about phone security as there so few phone models in general circulation that working out how to crack a single model such as an iPhone fingerprint scanner would be a massively lucrative criminal endeavour.

At first glance this sounds impossible without James Bond style false finger prints, but when you think about it further a different approach would also work. You don't need to fool the scanner you need to be able to modify or replace the program that does the scan to always return true.

Clearly this isn't easy as apparently nobody has managed it yet.

If someone has and manages to install the new software via a visit to a site of say dodgy adult interest than over the next few years x% of stolen or lost iPhones would be open to any one, possibly via a "secret" swipe pattern.

Many people with infected phones would never notice as the phone would continue to work as normal, yes some infected phones would be uninfected by software updates.

I do think that we as a society need to consider if we are jumping into phone apps because they are so convenient when they work and if they don't there is moral outrage that I paid 2p per month for this and it doesn't have 100% up time or that there is a security flaw. :-)

Bye

Ian