[Tagging] Charging stations: Authentication

[Danilo]

Hello all, hello Martin

It seems my previous e-mail is visible in the archive, so here's the (updated) reply that I sent 7 months ago, but apparently it didn't make it onto the ML...

> why does one have to authenticate in order to charge, wouldn’t payment be sufficient?

Sometimes you can pay directly without authentication (with a payment card, by SMS, through a credit-card based online payment system behind a QR code, etc), sometimes a charging station is free to use without any authentication. However, at least in Central Europe, the majority of commercial charging stations are part of a charging network, with roaming agreements between them. This means that you need to authenticate in some way in order to unlock the station / charging port.

Usually (in my experience) two main methods are being offered:

- Use the network's app to unlock the charging station
- Use an RFID card or an RFID keychain tag to unlock the charging station

Often you can also scan a QR code and enter your credit card details, but again, that's payment, not authentication.

Once you're authenticated, depending on the network, the money for charging may be deduced from your prepaid balance or it may be charged directly to your credit card. Some networks also send you a monthly invoice, or they provide subscriptions with flat-rate fees.

My suggestions:

- Authentication should be about "when you're standing in front of this charging station, how can you unlock that charging station". This is orthogonal to payment.

- I feel "authentication:membership_card" should be deprecated, because it does not tell you how to unlock the charging station. If you have a membership card with a chip, but the charging station only supports RFID, then you won't be able to unlock it. Instead, if a charging station supports a contactless membership card, then "authentication:contactless" should be used instead (taginfo: used 6802 times). Often charging networks support both a generic RFID token (provided by the user) or a RFID membership card for unlocking, and in this case they would both be covered by "authentication:contactless". If a charging station has a chip card reader for a membership card, then I would suggest the new tag "authentication:chip_card". (I have never seen such a membership card so far, so this suggestion is only for completeness of the tagging schema.) Note that "authentication:membership_card=yes" is currently used almost 14000 times, so this should probably be discussed thoroughly.

- Right now "authentication:money_card=yes" is used 139 times and "authentication:debit_card=yes" is used 67 times. I suspect that a lot of those cases are actually about payment, and not about authentication. Are there cases where a payment card can be used for authentication (independent from the payment itself)? If yes, then the user will probably link the card number against his membership account, making the payment card a kind of membership card. This could then be covered by "authentication:contactless" or "authentication:chip_card". However, I doubt that there are charging stations where the pure ownership of a mastercard grants you access to it, independendent from the payment method.

- I would deprecate "authentication:nfc" because it overlaps with "authentication:contactless". From looking at a contactless membership token or card, you cannot tell whether it is actually NFC, or RFID (which is a superset of NFC) or some other kind of contactless authentication system. At least two of the membership cards I have are actually plain RFID cards without any NFC features. Additionally, when mapping a charging station that has some type of "contactless" symbol on it, you won't know either whether it's NFC or something else.

I'd be happy about discussing these proposals!

Cheers,
Danilo