Slightly unsettling Apple Pay moment...

[John6Plus]

So just a few minutes ago I put my 6+ down on the edge of my laptop (a Sony, sorry) at work and when it bumped, the Pay screen came up, asking for my fingerprint. Well this caught me off guard. For giggles I decided to authorize it, and thankfully it told me to get closer to the scanner, and obviously didn't approve anything.

Has anyone else seen it randomly triggered like this? The phone was unlocked at the time, but not in any app. What on earth could have triggered this? I couldn't get it to happen again, and the fact that it was on the laptop makes me wonder if something, somehow, in it could have triggered it. *shrug*

 

[deeddawg]

Sounds like your laptop has an NFC active mode interface built into it.

The iphone 6/6+ has a passive NFC interface that "wakes up" and displays ApplePay when you place the phone in range of an NFC active mode device.

Not sure why it wouldn't activate again.

Ideally Apple will update things so that ApplePay only "wakes up" when at a payment terminal rather than any active NFC interface. Hold you phone next to an access card reader and it'll wake up to ApplePay also.

I don't think there's a security issue here due to how EMV tokenization works, but there's certainly a possible perception issue as most of the public won't understand enough about what's going on under the hood.

 

[Tyler23]

So just a few minutes ago I put my 6+ down on the edge of my laptop (a Sony, sorry) at work and when it bumped, the Pay screen came up, asking for my fingerprint. Well this caught me off guard. For giggles I decided to authorize it, and thankfully it told me to get closer to the scanner, and obviously didn't approve anything.

Has anyone else seen it randomly triggered like this? The phone was unlocked at the time, but not in any app. What on earth could have triggered this? I couldn't get it to happen again, and the fact that it was on the laptop makes me wonder if something, somehow, in it could have triggered it. *shrug*

Where were you? Anywhere near an NFC terminal?

Actually, just looked it up, and it appears some Sony laptops (like the Vaio) are NFC capable, meaning it could be acting as a "terminal" of sorts that the iPhone is recognizing. Obviously nothing would happen as it's not a payment terminal, but that would explain it. It's similar to boarding pass scanners at airports triggering Apple Pay as they too are NFC capable.

 

[John6Plus]

Sounds like your laptop has an NFC active mode interface built into it.

The iphone 6/6+ has a passive NFC interface that "wakes up" and displays ApplePay when you place the phone in range of an NFC active mode device.

Not sure why it wouldn't activate again.

Heh, yep. It turns out I wasn't doing it in quite the right place when I was trying again. My laptop does indeed have an NFC interface (that I just now found out about, obviously). Now I can get it to pop up every time.

Now to see if this is of any use whatsoever on the laptop side...

False alarm, nothing to see here

 

[mcdj]

Congrats on your purchase of the new Sony Xperia. It should arrive next week.

 

[John6Plus]

Congrats on your purchase of the new Sony Xperia. It should arrive next week.

Nooooooooooooooooooo...

I've turned off the NFC after trying to figure out what on earth I could do with the "One Touch" functionality in a laptop. Haven't found anything yet.