For starters, there’s security: It's really hard for someone to take your phone and use your Google Wallet, or to take your card and add it to their own phone. That’s certainly something we’re thinking about, but it’s more about how we can make these experiences - the ones where you need to use a camera, or in our case, items from your wallet - better. So the big picture here is that digital wallets help us carry around less stuff? Ha! So think about what else you carry around: your wallet and your keys. So now, you don’t have to carry around both, if you don’t want to.Īhhh yes, I am old enough to remember attending college gatherings with my digital camera and my flip phone. Then, thanks to improvements in computing power, hardware and image processing algorithms, engineers merged the function of the camera - taking photos - into mobile phones. It was a unique device that did a specific thing. Look at the camera: You used to carry around a separate item, a camera, to take photos. We’ve seen this shift where something you physically carry around becomes part of your smartphone before, right? Let’s start with a basic question: What is a digital wallet?Ī digital wallet is simply an application that holds digital versions of the physical items you carry around in your actual wallet or purse. Google Wallet, which will be coming soon in over 40 countries, is the new digital wallet for Android and Wear OS devices…but how does it work? So what makes digital versions of these items more legit than a photo? To better understand the digitization of what goes into our wallets and purses, I talked to product manager Dong Min Kim, who works on the brand new Google Wallet. In this case, it’s acceptable to show someone a picture of a card, but for other things it isn’t - an image of your driver’s license or credit card certainly won’t work.

Luckily, the host is OK with the photo of it on your phone.

In recent months, you may have gone out to dinner only to realize you left your COVID vaccine card at home.

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