The Future of the ID card

KOI ANUNTA/YH

Take a look at your Yale identification card. This lean, mean, ID machine gives you access to gates and buildings, allows you to eat in dining halls and take out library books, and—as a new feature this year—lets you do that 3 am laundry load without quarters.

This 3.3"x2.1"x0.02" powerhouse features a barcode on the front, two magnetic strips on the back, and, wedged between the two layers of the card, an antenna. All this technology brings the price of the card to $7, and provides nearly limitless capabilities. Ernst Huff, executive director of Yale's Student Financial and Administrative Systems, said, "This card represents one of the most technically sophisticated among universities and corporations."

Yet, despite the ID card's potential, it probably doesn't sit alone in your wallet. Next to the card in your wallet might be a cluster printing card, a library copy card, and perhaps even credit and banking cards, too.

The parts of your ID.

All of that clutter seems unnecessary; the Yale ID card, with its technological capabilities, could serve the functions of all of those cards. But it doesn't-yet. This might change very soon. Huff's office is forming project teams to explore the general goal of adding features to the ID card, which would obviate some of those other cards. However, each added feature would incorporate technological improvements that all come with some tradeoff in security, privacy, or choice.

To decide where to go next, Yale is turning to students and staff for guidance, while keeping an eye on one school that pioneered successful ID card systems: Duke.

The DukeCard: 'it ends up being your life'

While Yale did not integrate gate access and meal plans onto one encoded card until 1996, Duke had an expanded vision of an ID card's purpose much earlier. In 1985, Duke it implemented its current DukeCard system; two years later, the cards worked on copy machines. By 1988, ten years before Yale ID cards incorporated the same feature, Duke was testing out the use of ID cards for laundry service. "We were really pioneers in the field, testing out technology," John Diaz, director of the DukeCard system, said.

Today, the DukeCard is used for nearly every on-campus transaction. "It basically ends up being your life," Emmanuel Chang '01 said. "You can access any building, access basketball tickets, buy food, check out books, pay for laundry, and buy food." The DukeCard can deduct from two distinct student accounts: one for food items, and one for non-food items. Unlike at Yale, students can put as much money into their food account as they wish, and then can spend that money on any food item, including candy bars from vending machines and pizzas delivered from the local Domino's. Copying, laundry, or buying computer supplies from the university store, the money is deducted from their non-food account.

Online or off?

The extensive capabilities of Duke's ID card system are a direct result of its commitment to a centralized, online system, in which the DukeCards hold only an identification number, and where all information is stored in a central computer. Diaz said that Duke chose such a system because it seemed best suited for the important security features of the card.

"We knew from day one that the security system would have to be online," Diaz said. "Security has to be online, so we can know the status of the door and who's going in, and so we can cancel lost cards on the fly."

Once Duke hard wired all gates with readers for the DukeCard's magnetic strip, it was a small additional expense to add readers to vending machines, laundry machines, and on-campus stores; between $1,000 to $4,000 for a reader, depending on its type.

Yale's security system differs from Duke's in its use of proximity readers on residential college gates, which are linked to the antennas embedded in the Yale ID card. "The thing that makes us unique is that antenna, which is required because of the mechanism the University chose for the gates," Huff said. This mechanism allows the readers to detect the card even buried in a wallet or pocket. Harvard instead uses a magnetic strip reader on gates, which means that "we can't do that cool thing with our butts," Konstantin Kakaes '01 said, referring to the familiar motion of anxious-for-access Yale students.

However, the disadvantage of the antenna system is that Yale still does not have the infrastructure necessary to implement an online system for vending machines, copiers, and other features. Huff said that the current plan is to quickly implement an offline system, while building the infrastructure necessary to eventually go online.

One offline system is the current laundry service, where the ID cards' vending magnetic strip (the thinner strip on the back) is encoded with value, and each time a student uses a laundry machine, readers deduct money from the card. The information is encoded on the card, not a central computer.

Clearly, this is not preferable to an online system. While Huff said that the laundry service has been a success, and cost the university nothing (the vendor paid for the improvement to cut the cost of collecting quarters from the machines), it is an imperfect system. Some machines no longer take coins, and those that do take coins charge coin users more than they charge card users., "I think it's stupid that without the card, it's more expensive," Sherry Farzan-Kashani, TD '01, commented. "Also, the system doesn't seem to be working all the time—sometimes it just doesn't accept the card, or machines don't work." Huff recognizes the need for an online system, and is starting a push to prepare Yale for this radical change. The first step is to standardize ID card use to the magnetic strip, and eliminate the bar code—"it's old technology," he said.

Choosing direction

Merely deciding to go with an online system is only the first step; it creates many new opportunities for new Yale ID features, and thus will require many more decisions. Yale is not yet at the stage where it can be making those decisions, but it is preparing. And Huff stated commitment to getting student input before his office made any major decisions. He said, "Part of what we're doing now is formalizing a process for students to come to us with ideas."

The first important decision facing Yale is how to implement a student account system. Harvard and New York University (NYU), like Duke, has a student debit system, in which students have debit accounts with the university, and each time they spend, money is deducted from that debit account. At all three schools, these accounts are used for vending purchases, but Duke and NYU also go beyond that.

Duke has established a relationship with local restaurants whereby students can order in, and charge it to their cards. "The off-campus places were gung-ho on getting into this meal plan," Diaz said. "We're running $12-13 million through that program." NYU's Campus Cash program has signed up area restaurants and stores to accept charges on the NYU card. According to NYU's Christopher Torsiello, an NYUCard Services Public Relations Assistant, "NYUCard Services is always looking to expand the Campus Cash program. We are always signing up new vendors and looking for ways to make purchases easier for NYU students."

NYU student Rose Payyappilli '01 is not enthusiastic about Campus Cash. "The Campus Cash thing is ridiculous," she said. "it's not accepted widely, so people don't have enough use for it." She does think that it would be quite popular if more local retailers signed up, because, as a university debit account, "it's parent-paid, not student-paid." Yale students are not immune to this attraction—witness the extreme popularity of bursar billing. Farzan-Kashani said, "I really like bursar billing stuff." Huff recognizes the popularity of bursar billing, and would like to use the existing student account for automatic withdrawal, and in that plan, which would allow for on-campus vending, copying, and printing, is the "potential for non-campus services," he said. "We're in the early process of exploring what [services] those might be."

However, until a university can successfully sign up enough local merchants for its university debit account program, its hard to beat the convenience of a real debit card. The technology exists for ID cards to incorporate a 16-digit ISO (the International Standard) bank number that would allow students to spend directly from their bank account-like a debit card. Dave Wamback, manager of Harvard's Identification and Data Services, said that Harvard has thus far not gone that route, for a number of reasons. "We don't want the ISO numbers going over our network, and we haven't seen a convincing financial reason to do it," he said. "It's great for the bank; however, the benefit to the University has not been proven."

Wamback also mentioned another drawback to incorporating bank card features into the Harvard ID card: it would give the impression that the university was choosing the students' bank for them. This is an example of a common conflict that has arisen for schools like Harvard and Duke-and that will arise for Yale-as they contemplated adding new features to cards: by allying with commercial providers, are the schools limiting students' choices?

Diaz is interested in the idea of incorporating a banking card into the DukeCard. He said, "We are considering that. We just had a meeting with a local bank to discuss that." But he recognizes the importance of not limiting students' choices. "We wouldn't force people to use it, but still some would feel they were forced to one bank," he said. "Penn State partnered with a couple of banks, so there's some choice."

Huff agreed that choice would be very important for any such plan for the Yale ID card. "We would never force students to make a selection," he said.

This of course also applies to incorporating credit card features into an ID card, although Wamback reports that there are a number of major additional problems with such a plan. "To do something like that, we would have to create a large bureaucracy to deal with special regulations to handle accounts, which are much more extensive than the regulations which govern debit cards," he said. In addition, he added, "When you're dealing with expenditures outside the university, you are also subject to unrelated business income taxes (UBIT)." This is because it is unclear whether providing students with the ability to make off-campus purchases is integral to a university's business mission.

Another feature that involves aligning the ID card with a large company is a calling card feature. This is not a technology upgrade per se-it involves putting the phone number of a long-distance carrier on the card (e.g., 1-800-CALL-ATT), and then getting students to sign up for a plan with that carrier. As Wamback pointed out, "it is in the interest of the carrier to establish a long-term relationship with the student." For that reason, the students and the university are given discounts. Nonetheless, as Wamback said, "You have to balance a number of factors before making a decision. Are you endorsing one company over another? Does it truly benefit the student?"

Both Duke and NYU have decided that it does. Each school has a deal with AT&T, whereby students can sign up with the long-distance carrier, and in exchange they get a Student Advantage card for one year, which confers many benefits and discounts on its holder.

How smart are smart cards?

While the ID cards at Duke and Harvard have incorporated many new features and increased convenience for students in the past few years, they have not yet crossed the next frontier: into smart-card technology. Smart cards incorporate chips onto the card so that they can store all kinds of information—including banking information, medical records, and computer access privileges. Wamback envisioned a use for smart cards in which students would swipe their cards at computer terminals and then enter their password, for an added level of security. He said, "There's a lot of talk about how they could be used."

But for now that's all talk, largely because of the high price of the technology and the added expense to a University of changing much of its infrastructure. An ID card with an embedded computer chip would cost approximately $15, and "right now, that's not cost effective," Wamback said. However, he added, "When banking goes to smart cards, and costs go down, I can see a lot of people going to smart cards."

Diaz agreed that smart cards are not yet practical. "In our case, all vending and laundry is online, so I don't see any advantages to smart cards," he said. "If we were doing it from scratch again, we might consider it. But today, online beats chip." Duke's current ID cards cost less than a dollar, so "right now we basically give away the cards," Diaz said.

Gaining access

While the Yale ID's vending features are still far behind the DukeCard, Yale's technology for ID gate and building access is already quite advanced. But the University is expanding the very definition of access, by making more buildings ID accessible and encouraging student groups to upgrade from sticker control to ID control.

This is all a far cry from three or four years ago, when instead of doing "the cool thing with their butts," Yale students had to use keys to access their residential colleges. This had two drawbacks: if a student lost his key, securing the residential college would require changing the locks, and students could not access other residential colleges.

Much has changed in the last few years. While students in residential colleges can enter their gates with their ID cards, students in the swing space can top that-they access their rooms with their key cards, by swiping their card through a magnetic-stripe reader. As the residential colleges are renovated in the coming years, their entryways will be switched to ID-card access, according to Jack Gundrum, director of campus security.

Gundrum said there are no current plans to make more Old Campus gates ID-card accessible, but he added that campus security is adding ID-card access to many buildings, including Payne Whitney Gymnasium and Hendrie Hall. Adding a proximity reader to a gate could cost between $50,000 and $60,000, but making a building ID-card accessible with magnetic-stripe readers would only cost between $4,500 and $25,000.

Gundrum added that more buildings might eventually be upgraded with ID-card readers, but that there is no firm policy. "Rather than have a policy, we have to make an assessment building by building," he said. "We would have to determine that this is a building that students might need access to it 24 hours a day. Then we'd make some evaluation of what the cost of that is, and decide if we want to do that."

The parts of the ID: the back.

Huff's office is exploring another realm in which it would be possible to expand the use of ID cards for access: student organizations. This exploration is fueled by the havoc that stickers, the current preferred access control for student organizations, can wreak havoc on the ID card's magnetic strip. So Huff's office has formed project groups to encourage a number of groups that currently use stickers to switch to cheap (less than $100) magnetic strip readers. This could mean entering a Yale Political Union, Yale Film Society, or other student-organization-sponsored event by swiping into a reader, which would then check your eligibility for that event.

With all new technology comes tradeoffs, and the increased access to Yale facilities is no exception. One security concern is that if a student in the swing space lost his ID, the person who found it could access the student's room, whereas for other dorms an intruder with an ID card would not be able to access a room without the room key.

Gundrum pointed out that it is unlikely for the potential thief to find the student's room number and then access the room before the student reported his card missing. This small risk, he said, is outweighed by the advantage of being able to deactivate an ID card immediately upon reporting it missing. When a student loses a key, it takes security two days to change the lock on the door.

Another potential concern for some students is the ability of the automated access system to record their every motion. Gundrum confirmed that security keeps a record, going back six to nine months, of who accessed which card-controlled facility when, but said that University policy is to use this information only in the case of a security investigation.

This security tool has helped Yale police in at least one successful investigation. "The one that really stands out, it turned out to be an employee in the medical school who was stealing ," Gundrum said. "The police were able to go back and look at this guy's pattern over time, and realized he was always in the room where thefts take place. He was in a position where he had legitimate entry to those areas."

Farzan-Kashani, for one, does not mind the Big Brother aspect of security's ability to track when students access gates and buildings. She said, "I think it's reassuring, that they have that as a way to keep track of people going to places they don't belong." Duke and Harvard have policies similar to Yale's regarding releasing access information. At both schools, the information is only made available to police if necessary for an investigation. Wamback emphasized that Harvard's policy was set with attention to striking "a balance between privacy." He added that the decision to make access information available to the police was based on an agreement between students and the administration. However, Kakaes was not aware of such a policy. "I think that that's a very tightly kept fact," he said. "I think that if they allowed universal key card access, they could justify that policy, but given that people are only allowed to enter their residence, it's questionable."

Looking ahead

So what exactly will Yale's ID card be able to do in two years, or five years, or ten? That clearly hasn't been decided yet. One thing is clear: students won't have to carry around nearly as many cards as they do now.

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