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Comment by omegaham | Hacker News Reader

I have a quick question about this - there is exactly one business in my area that has actually switched over to chipped cards, and that's Home Depot. Everyone else goes "lol we don't do that, use the magnetic swipe like a normal person" when I try it. I thought that the adoption date was in October, and seeing as how everyone has the machines already... what the hell is going on?

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There's an interesting set of incentives at play. The October deadline was actually a shift in liability - now businesses still using swipe transactions will become liable for any losses due to fraudulent transactions, while the card companies will continue to be liable for chipped ones.

Beyond that I don't know too much - maybe the price of the hardware is such that it makes sense to risk it for a little while before buying a chip-capable machine (do people lease them?). The part I really don't understand is that there are businesses with chipped terminals that still insist on you swiping, I can't work out why they'd want that at all.

C&P seems noticeably slower than magnetic stripe at the moment. Possibly due to stores still running their POS on PSTN connections. I wouldn't be surprised if some places were still using stripes to avoid slowdowns at checkout.

Liability was to switchover from the issuer to the merchants' processors (banks) in October, so that was the big push, to off-set liabilities. My experience is about 25% require Chip and PIN.

Some consumers are registering complaints about slow lines due to C&P[1] most of it due to longer C&P processing time.

[1]http://security.itbusinessnet.com/article/One-in-Five-Consum...

Merchants can continue to accept mag stripe transactions but they do so at their own risk. Failing to switch to EMV by the switchover date in October means that any fraud that occurs via a non-EMV transaction is now the merchant's liability. Instead of credit card companies and banks eating the losses from fraud, the individual merchant eats it now.

I was just at a coffeeshop today in SF that had a chip reader and it seemed to be plugged into a Square register.

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