Apple Pay survives on convenience. "Don't worry about getting out your wallet or fishing in your purse. Just point your iPhone 6 at this register thing and be on your way!" Anything that disrupt that simple flow would pretty much doom the technology, such as asking customers for physical IDs every time you buy something for instance.


One Missouri lawmaker is proposing exactly that. This short report from a St. Louis Fox News affiliate, spotted by 9to5Mac, briefly outlines reprsentative Joshua Peters' plan to have customers provide a drivers license for additional identification when paying for something with a phone or tablet. Additionally, cashiers would have to record the numbers or be possibly held liable.

Although the bill was made with possibly good intentions by limiting commercial fraud from stolen smartphones, Apple Pay only works in concert with Touch ID using your fingerprint as a passcode. But I guess just in case your common everyday iPhone stealing criminal is also a world-class biometric hacker, this is a good thing. Not to mention that faking a physical ID would be much, much easier than fooling smartphone fingerprint censors.


Apple Pay has security vulnerabilities sure, but so does every payment system on the planet and introducing physical IDs isn't going to help. In the end, this is a classic case of facepalm legislation that will likely and hopefully be killed in its infancy. [9to5Mac]