Retailers are disabling NFC readers to shut out Apple Pay

The Verge ^ | October 25, 2014 01:09 pm | By Dante D'Orazio

[Swordmaker]

You will never get me to believe Apple isn’t getting a piece of the action.

They are, but it isn't coming from the merchant. The banks and credit card companies have agreed to pay for Apple's end because of the reduction in Fraud losses it will engender. They figure they will save far more than what they will be paying Apple in lower Fraud losses. When people stop using card that have re-usable credit and debit card numbers and use tokenized one time use numbers, it will be impossible for intercepted numbers to be re-used, and unscrupulous buyers cannot claim they did not make the purchase when it requires their living fingerprint to authorize the purchase, not just the swiping of a card, or entering a number in a terminal.

[TruthWillWin]

2-3%. PayPal is 4-5%.

[Swordmaker]

I think none of them want Apple Pay because it is slow, gets hung up forever and crashes with no way to recover the data.

All based on years of expert evaluation, I assure you.

Evaluation of WHAT, Gunsequalfreedon? Your navel? Do you own or use Apple products?

And I have more than 35 years in the industry in multi-platform consulting. I think that experience might trump yours.

Your claim that Pay crashes is based on NO experience at all, least of all "years of expert evaluation." First of all, because it has not been out years, it's been operational only a week. Secondly, because Apple does not store any Pay data the merchant of the banks or credit card companies would NEED to recover. So you don't know at ALL what you are talking about. Everything at the transaction level is independent of Apple. You are debunked. Just FUD.

Finally, no one has reported Pay getting hung up. It is just as quick as it takes to select which card the user wants and pressing the fingerprint reader. Done. Again, you don't know what you are talking about. More FUD.

The only problems reported has been that Bank of America, at there end, double charged Pay users for about 1000 transactions, for which they have apologized and took for responsibility, stating it was not the fault of Apple. . . and that some NFC card readers were not capable of receiving the signal because they had been incapacitated by the retailers, as this article stated.

I suspect that restraint of trade claims will be filed against these retailers for this action by their credit card processing companies.

[Swordmaker]

you know this how? I’ve been using it already and it’s blazingly fast and nothing has been lost.

Don’t know where you’ve been using it... would be interested to know.

He doesn't know it, nor does he use one. He's making up claims that he can't back up or prove. This is standard fare for anti-Apple trolls.

[Swordmaker]

Jeez, you seem like a BetaMax and HD-DVD kind of guy. Apple Pay is going to be VERY successful. I deal with CVS and every time I fill a prescription there I’ll try to use Apple Pay to pay from my bank’s “debit card”. When they tell me they don’t accept Apple Pay with its minimal cost (from CVS’ perspective) I’ll whip out the old American Express card (which costs CVS a relative “arm and a leg”) and let them eat the costs.

Try ZERO cost from CVS's point of view. The credit card and banks pay the costs of Pay. They think they will make back more than what they pay Apple in savings in reduced fraud losses.

[ConservativeMind]

Yes, those two companies could review your total amounts, and where you bought, but the products are kept on your receipt and, therefore, also kept with the retailer.

With ApplePay and Google Wallet, as long as the retailer wasn't using a payment system that tied into Apple or Google, there would be no way to reconcile person with purchase.

Unfortunately, Google alone has many, many payment system backends, thanks partly to Google’s web API. Heck, Google is the collector of FR’s own page view counter (look at your executed scripts on this page). I don't trust that Google's scripts only do the innocent things for which people may use them.

Only Google can piece everything back together—no one else can at this point. And I don't trust Google at all.

[Swordmaker]

Do you really believe that? I mean, I can think of a hundred ways for those companies to share information about your purchases. I know, I’ve built some of those systems. There is no way on God’s green Earth that they will forego the revenue from such data sharing. No way. Consumer purchase data is the biggest revenue generator.

Besides, the fact that Apple says they do not share their customer's data, which I believe because if they are caught doing so, CEO Tim Cook, who wrote that in an official company communique, would be liable for major government fines, as well as stockholder lawsuits. But more importantly because Apple never gets the data. They don't receive it at the servers, they don't even transmit it.

Only the card issuer, or its Merchant card aggregating servicing agent, gets the transaction amount data and they only get that and the merchant to whom it should be paid. At the final end, YOU are the bank and credit card's customer, the merchant most often is not. The merchant is, however, the Merchant card aggregating service agencies customer, but they don't get any usable data either. In the end, the bank and credit card company only know you purchased something for X amount from XYZ merchant, not what. The Merchant only knows that the bank assigned you a TOKEN XXXXXXXX. . . was used to pay the X amount from credit/Debit card. No name, no address, no nothing to track. The next time you purchase from that merchant, a new token is provided. The merchant only gets a token which carries absolutely no identification data. There is literally NOTHING to track. Sorry, you can't track what you don't have. Only YOUR 256 bit encrypted iPhone carries the data of what, where, and the amount of your purchase for your purposes. Apple cannot decrypt that iPhone, even under a court order, because they don't have your passcode.

Your claim that "Consumer purchase data is the biggest revenue generator" is false. Otherwise, Google would be the largest company on earth. It isn't Apple is. . . and they get their revenue from generating sales to their customers by selling great products, not consumer purchase data. Even Google gets the majority of its revenue from sales of advertising.

The exact same tings said of ApplePay today were said about credit card transactions 25 years ago: “They are secure”, “No worries”, “Can’t be tracked”, etc.

No, you are wrong. Merchants were told that customers who used credit cards could be easily tracked for marketing purposes including what was purchased, where, when, etc., and also for credit collection purposes.

[zeugma]

I always write on the back of my card to ask for ID. I never sign them.

[Loud Mime]

My local banker told me that the fraud reduction is the big reason they jumped on the Apple Pay bandwagon. Reduction in fraud means more profit and fewer hassles.

Who can argue with that?

oh, just read this thread....

[gunsequalfreedom]

Did you see the beach ball of death in my original post? Think that might be a clue I intended it to be Apple Mac bashing?

Bashing aside, if your clients are taking your advice to buy Apple they have a been given advice thats unecessarily wasting their money.

I don’t place much stock in your 35 years experience. I have many years working both platforms in a very intense work setting. I’ll give you the Macs can take a beating. I’ve beat on the things plenty of times. The Windows machines do more and communicate with the rest of the world making them far more efficient.

Apple is a complete feel good cult waste of money. No insult intended.

[Swordmaker]

More proof you don't have a clue about what you are talking about:

Barron’s takes Apple Pay for a spin: ‘The system worked flawlessly’
Saturday, October 25, 2014 · 11:15 am

“There’s not much private about your wallet anymore. Recent breaches at Target and Home Depot exposed as many as 96 million credit and debit cards. Apple Pay, launched last week, could help. It links your credit and debit cards to a secure iPhone chip,” Alexander Eule reports for Barron’s. “In typical Apple fashion, the process is dead simple. I added my American Express card, already on file with iTunes, while walking down the street.” “Last week, colleagues and I gorged on McDonald’s dollar menu, courtesy of Apple Pay. The system worked flawlessly,” Eule reports. “The real benefit of Apple Pay is that card numbers are never transferred to the merchant. Apple Pay instead sends a token and a one-time cryptogram key to the merchant. The token is useless to a would-be hacker or thief. Meanwhile, the thumb scanner adds an additional layer of authentication, without the hassle of a PIN number.”

Contrary to your spinning, anti-Apple trolling FUD, everyone who is actually experiencing Pay, it is working flawlessly. Thanks for playing. I think you suffer from a sever case of MAPS:

Swordmaker's and Kathy's proposed diagnosis for the new ICD-10 addenda:

90210 iOS Munchausen's Apple-Plexy Syndrome (MAPS), The overwhelming compulsion to post negative, judgmental, aggressive, and false commentary on any website thread related to Apple products wherever found, including phobic reaction to projected Apple user euphoria. First and subsequent encounters.

[gunsequalfreedom]

Contrary to your spinning, anti-Apple trolling FUD, everyone who is actually experiencing Pay, it is working flawlessly.

Question for you. What is the square box that appears in the sentence above "Pay"?

Are you typing on a Mac? I've been trying to figure out why text goes awry like that on here every so often.

Do you see that. Pay

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

BFL

[Swordmaker]

I don’t place much stock in your 35 years experience. I have many years working both platforms in a very intense work setting. I’ll give you the Macs can take a beating. I’ve beat on the things plenty of times. The Windows machines do more and communicate with the rest of the world making them far more efficient.

Ah, you are one of those IT guys who make lots of money bamboozling Windows users into keeping junk. Everyone I've convinced to move to a Mac has thanked me and they have stopped having problems. Your statements show you do not understand the power of Macs at all. Your claim that "Windows machines do more" shows the depths of your ignorance. You seem to think Windows is powerful. . . but my UNIX™ powered operating system is far more powerful than your limited Windows machines as it currently runs three different versions of Windows in sandboxes as well as two versions of Linux, all in windows under OS X.10, sometimes at the same time. . . so that I can provide answers to my clients' questions when they call. I also have a couple of other exotic OSes available, such as THEOS, for some clients that they run for special applications that I can boot up if I need to. Oh, and Macs can communicate with the rest of the world, just fine. . . or do you think that UNIX has trouble doing that? If so, what machine was the World Wide Web invented on? And on what machines do most of the Internet operate on? Computers using Unix derivative OSes such as Linux. What engine do many browsers use? Apple's WEBKIT!

So, I will put my more than 35 years of owning and running a consulting business against your obvious ignorance of anything except Windows anytime.

Now, let's get back to your obvious ignorance of Pay.

What in HELL does the Apple Mac Marble of Doom from 2003 have to do with an iPhone 6 app on iOS from 2014 that DOES EVEN NOT RUN ON A MAC which does not have an NFC transmitter????

Did you see the beach ball of death in my original post? Think that might be a clue I intended it to be Apple Mac bashing?

That proves you were posting FUD! TROLL! And you obviously admit you are suffering from MAPS.

[Swordmaker]

Question for you. What is the square box that appears in the sentence above "Pay"?

Of course I see it. Obviously your Windows computer does not have a complete set of characters. The proper name of ApplePay is the icon of the Apple Logo and the word "Pay". You find it on the web that way. It's YOUR problem, not mine, that your computer is limited in its fontography. An Apple computer will properly render any character it is presented. They ship with complete sets. It's one of the reasons Apple's have always been the computers of choice in publishing.

[zaxtres]

Number 1 in the list why retailers are not going along with ApplePay. ApplePay doesn’t allow the retailer to track your purchases. CurrentC does. For example the other day I made a purchase with a credit card to a company I was never at before and did not give them any of my information. By the time I returned home, the company had sent me an email telling me of how many things they had on sale that I could purchase. They got this from my CC information as I never gave it to them. I will prefer ApplePay any day over CurrentC.

Sam’s Club is Walmart’s btw.

[gunsequalfreedom]

“One of the computers of choice in publishing...”

You mean dropped fonts that cause text to go missing in an ad, costing a large credit to the customer?

You mean hours spent trying to process an ad that a PC can handle in a few seconds?

You mean receiving the ad from a client that created it on a PC, transitioning to Mac and then transitioning back to PC so the presses running PC can work with it (except when they drop the text)?

You mean avoiding fonts because they are known to crash the Mac?

You mean creating characters that can only be seen on a Mac so the text it produces looks unitelligable?

Now I know you are one of the people that insist the only problem with a Mac is a PC.

Mac is not the system of choice at all publishing firms, only at the ones that want to double up on IT expense.

[Loud Mime]

A feel-good cult? Hmmmm, I’m in the Tea Party; my liberal sister calls that a cult, along with the NRA and my old church.

I bought my first Mac about three years ago after dealing with years of Windows problems. I had BSOD’s or lockups at terrible times. One full crash resulted in the loss of a lot of important data, costing me lots of time and $$$.

I’ve yet to have a problem with my MacBook Pro. It is a worker’s machine, not the do-it-all system for gamers and such. I do not have to purchase additional software for safety and now I back up my data solely in case my laptop is lost or stolen. Because of its quality and function It has been the best computer investment I’ve ever made.

Come to think of it, I do feel good about switching to Mac.

[Sir_Ed]

We’re a publisher, and send our CTP files to the biggest printer in North America, and their entire system, from layout to RIPper, is Mac.

Macs handle fonts better, they handle color spaces better, they handle color modes better, they handle eps’s better, they handle ID/Pshop/AI->PDF workflows better, they do everything better, its why most newpspapers and printers use Macs running the Mac Adobe suite and Multi-Ad creator programs.

I’ve got twenty years in the biz and it’s always been such.

Ed

[Sir_Ed]

Every single one of our Macs are still in use and still working...from a Quadra 800 I bought at Comdex almost 20 years ago to a 604e, two Power Macs and a new Mac Pro, all running flawlessly.

The things are built to last forever, although I really, really dislike what they’e done to the new Mac Pro.

Ed