The credit card shell game https://plus.google.com/+LaurenWeinstein/posts/gFeicN4qqd6
I guess I forgot that most people have never been merchants who accepted credit cards. I have been. And so most people don't understand that signatures at point of sale are not for verification of the POS purchase, but to provide an additional historical data point for examination in case of disputes. Even when people tend to scribble their signatures on modern terminals, there is a typical pattern across purchases that is difficult for a forger to duplicate. The signature on the back of the card itself is irrelevant. When chip-based cards were introduced, the intention was that they'd be used with PINs. This is the way that most of the world does it. It was realized from the start that the card alone was not secure. But here in the U.S. they didn't even want to bother with PINs, so they use card+signature. Now they're dumping the signature. If you read the historical discussions leading up to the adoption of these cards, you'll see that what U.S. card processors are doing is exactly what was considered to be the worst security case. Why are they doing it? Because the laws in this country are so lax that it's easy for them to pass along additional fraud costs in increased merchant fees, and the merchants then pass those along to consumers. It's the same shell game as always. Don't be fooled! --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): https://www.vortex.com/lauren Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com Google Issues Mailing List: https://vortex.com/google-issues Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: https://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Google+: https://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 --- Impeach Trump --- _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list https://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad
