

Why Apple Pay could be the mobile-payment system you'll actually use - bilalhusain
http://www.macworld.com/article/2607181/why-apple-pay-could-be-the-mobile-payment-system-youll-actually-use.html

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higherpurpose
The only reason I'd like to see it "succeed" is that whole tokenization thing
that keeps all credit card data private. That's a huge advantage over anything
else in my opinion, and if it succeeds, others like Google will have to
replicate it.

I know Google wallet creates a virtual credit number, but that remains
"permanent", so in terms of tracking, it's not that much different than using
the real credit number. It protects you against theft, but not tracking.

Now that I know this kind of tokenization is possible (and more importantly
_acceptable_ by the financial industry) even if I'm not going to be in the
Apple ecosystem, I'm not going to use anything else that doesn't use the same
method.

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fpgeek
What sort of tracking are you worried about?

If you're worried about merchant-level tracking, I think tokenization makes
little or no difference. Quoting from the article:

"Tokenization is typically handled by the payment network, which (in some
implementations) encrypts the credit card number right when you swipe it,
sends it back for the token, and then provides that to the merchant to keep
for things like refunds or customer tracking."

The only potential merchant-level tracking difficulty I can see is that tokens
can be merchant-specific, which might make unified customer tracking more
difficult after a merger. And even if financial institutions didn't provide
services like post-merger token-matching (something I wouldn't bet on), plenty
of merchants have quite a bit of experience using other signals to approximate
that kind of matching.

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gergles
Contactless EMV also doesn't send the name, making it much much much much
harder for companies to try to guess who you are to add you to their mailing
list (why do you think companies ask for your ZIP code so much? Name + ZIP
uniquely identifies a lot of the population).

(Contactless MSD doesn't either - it normally sends something like "VALUED
CUSTOMER" or "NOT AVAILABLE")

