Your Safeway card and your credit card tied to your government records. Why not add a tracking device? If this is the future, I'm not sure how much I like it.

This would make identity theft as easy as picking up a dropped card from the ground.

I think this is a good idea. It needs some refining to overcome the identity theft issues. How about one card for all of the "club savings" card that grocery stores, pharmacies, pet stores, etc. issue. As long as it is not tied to my social security number or financial information. I could get rid of 5 cards in my wallet.

As long as you can keep one store from knowing what you purchase at other stores.

I've always loved the idea of having only one card, but I must admit, it does pose MANY issues.

Not only those of privacy, control, etc. But it is my understanding that people get more cards than they need for the status which multiple cards (apparently) displays. A one card system would remove this status completely (which I actually think is probably a good thing).

One possiblity might be a device which holds a blank card, and stores the magnetic data of each card you might want to use. Select the card you want, and the device writes the magnetic data temporarily on a card. Use it once, and the card is blank again waiting to be re-written. Of course this is only benefitial if the device is smaller than all the cards you currently carry.

The benefits of a system like this is that the credit card companies could reduce their cost by not needing to produce the cards. Customers would purchase the system only once, and they could then have a number of cards with a magnetic system.

Ok, so what is the one line marketing pitch for this?

I do not agree with the fact that you want to have your driver's licence tied in with your Safeway card but I do agree that we should have some sort of common card. In Ontario, we have a couple of Government issued cards that I wished would be tied together. Ontario Driver's Licences and Health Card look exactly the same except for the colour. They both have your picture, name, address and other information. Why doesn't each areas of the Government talk to each other about that? It would save time a lot of hassles for the consumer. Airports are getting it right by putting in any credit card to identify yourself as when picking up your e-ticket at the airport. I like that idea of putting in your debit, credit or airline card to bring up your identity. Maybe your video and grocery store should adopt that kind of process as well!

Using the "one card rules them all" concept, i would likean itemized statement of all my purchasing behaviour overa month's time broken in to the tax categories. This wouldmake it much easier than sitting down with safeway receiptsand figuring out if a newspaper paid for on that receipt isa business expense.

I think this universal "certificate" should be owned andguaranteed by the government, and that linking cards to it be a function of a user of this government citizen... "single instance citizen" ... saves a lotta hastle. For that matter, incorporate social security and all government services, including tax filing and salaryreceipts so that nobody needs to file taxes, as the detailsare already on this big brother system.

To say its bad because of big brother concerns is unrealistic. It is already big brother, better that an elected body supervise identity management and certification than corporate bodies like today.

instead of using a card why not be identified by your finger print? this would get rid of any security threat. if thats not enough one could also be identified by retina as well. when making a purchase you could choose from the available credit sources you have from a lcd screen, at safeway for instance, your safeway 'card' account would come up automatically along with your sources of credit.

What if you could have a single account on a secure server on the internet that stored information for all of your accounts. You simply log in, and request a transaction. I do this already for a zillion different accounts.

This is a superb idea, and is one that could possibly revolutionize the way we think about finances. It is something that I've been thinking about for a while, along with some of the ideas that the other commenters have noted.

The ultimate solution is to have one card that can store the magnetic track data for all of your other cards. The ONE card will have a smart chip in it, with a biometric fingerprint authentication. When activated with a fingerprint, the owner can choose which card the magnetic stripe will "load". This can be done via a small button, or some kind of tiny LCD, etc. The technology can be developed.

The same idea can be applied for budget tracking as well, although it may need some modifications from the credit card industry. For example, say I own a Discover Card - just one card - but would like to create a budget at the beginning of the month/year/whatever and limit myself to only the amounts that I've prescribed. This can of course be done with a notebook and pencil, plus a lot of will-power and checking my notes and register to make sure I have enough in each budget folder, but wouldn't it be nice to have that budget enforced (with user-definable rules) on the card?

Case in point: I walk into a store, and buy some supplies for dinner. I take out my Discover card, and activate the "Food" budget folder on the card. I then swipe it, and it deducts the amount from my food budget. If I am over the limit, it could do a number of things, depending on what I've defined in my "rules": It could decline the authorization request, it could flag the register telling me that I'm over the limit, etc. That would be a much more elegant solution than attempting to get 10 different cards for each budget category... IMO.

This is a nightmare for secutiry issues. If you want your library card to double for your gardening club membership and your golf membership, then fine. Doing this with several credit cards is scary. Adding ID cards and other critical documents is insane.

The problems begin with what happens when (and I do mean when) these multi-function cards get stolen; get worse when you realise that cards get corruptly issued (2 of the 9/11 hijackers had genuine US driving licences which were issued corruptly); and get really scary when you work out how much money it would be worth to organised crime if they were to crack the tech and issue their own cards. Organised crime have at least billions of dollars, mostly laundered, just waiting for lucrative investment opportunities.

The bottom line is: always separate (technical term: compartmentalize) critical components of security related systems.

If you want to carry just one card, then do what I do. Leave the rest at home.

One could have a smartcard with "compartments", each password protectd. No values would be stored on the card, just references to an account in a database.

Great idea. I have been thinking about something like this for a while. It definitely makes sense to have a card for all the non-financially-sensible transactions such as dept stores, super markets, drug stores etc.

Writer and reader at the store. Only write membership information to the user's card at the time of registration. For every transaction at the cash register or so the readers should be able to read only the information that is written by that store and do some book keeping in their databases for promotions and discounts.

It would be nice to have standards set up across the industry (may be they are already present) to indicate what information goes on the card. Another device that can be made available at a store or an ATM is to display all the information back to the user after entering a PIN.

IMO, It is worth trying with just the store cards for now and plan for something grand for the credit cards and such.

Is this what you want?

The Universal Card

The Chameleon Card is it....it combines a neat feature of writing the magstripe on the fly with biometric convenience. Great idea, I wish I would've thought of it.

How about reducing each card to a minimum: namely just the magnetic strip, with a thin edge identifying the strip (supermarket, drugstore, bank, credit, etc)? You would insert the appropriate strip into a carrier card of standard size for swiping. A packet of 5 or 6 strips could probably be stored in a thin plastic sleeve the size of one standard credit card. This would reduce the ID theft problem.

A biometric system will probably go into effect within our lifetime, with a central server housing all of the relevant information (account numbers, memberships, etc.) This presents the ultimate scary situation - identity theft or falsification of information. To combat that I propose that the central server have several redundant backups (in random locations) AND that those backups NOT be realtime, but contain static (non-changable) snapshots of the information as of 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 2 months ago, 6 months ago and 1 year ago. That way if a person's information is hacked it becomes easier to find the truth and have things set right.

We might try using "smart cards" as drivers license/passport/social security/credit cards. All the necessary ID information could be encoded into the card, including cash "bank" account balances- thus the card needn't be associated with a bank or financial institution, or governmrnt agency; a single card incorporating iris and fingerprint ID would make all other kinds of ID unnecessary. At point of purchase, or when government officials (police) need to see ID, one's fingerprint or iris image would serve as "password" verification.

Very feasible, quite doable with existing technology

Not gonna happen.

www.justoneclubcard.com is a little idea I've been working on that matches your idea quite well. Let me know if you have any feedback.

So I'm totally against this idea - in its current state - but I'm for it in a slightly different way. I don't want my driver's license associated with grocery cards. But, I DO want to get rid of state driver's license cards. If we had one format, but still the states customize certain parts and set the requirements for it, it would make it much easier to check ID's - the DOB would always be in the same place.

One supermarket loyalty card (Migros) gives you a small self-adhesive barcode, which matches the barcode on the card. You can stick this anywhere, on another card, on the side of your wallet. At the supermarket till they just scan it, wherever it is.
Saves one card.