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Comment by cballard | Hacker News Reader

Apple Pay is just a nice frontend for Visa, AmEx, etc., with better security - disposable credit card numbers to defeat merchant tracking and leaks.

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Also faster.

Double-tap watch or iPhone button, wave device near register, done. Fast.

That vs Walmart Pay tap iPhone button, [swipe to find icon,] tap icon, wait for app, tap scan button, position camera for QR code, wait for focus & recognize, done. Too long.

I tried Walmart's Scan-and-Go app. Idea was you could scan all your stuff before reaching the register, scan one QR code, pay, and leave. Took an inordinately long time. Walmart dumped it.

Edit: actually there has been a "tap to pay" available at many places. All too often it was turned off, and mildly confusing which cards had it (I had one that did, then its replacement card didn't, so there I was waving a non-tap card at a tap reader). The whole tech fizzled.

My AmEx card has had tap-to-pay functionality for years now. I keep it in my wallet where it is nearest the outside and can use without removing from my wallet. Easy. No buttons. No QR codes. And it's old tech. Still not seeing the obvious argument for throwing such an important piece of my public persona (personal finances and credit) into the same basket as my cell phone.

> Still not seeing the obvious argument for throwing such an important piece of my public persona (personal finances and credit) into the same basket as my cell phone.

Having it as part of your cell phone makes it much more secure (Apple Pay requires your fingerprint for it to work).

Contactless cards can get skimmed:

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jul/23/contactless-car...

Your cell phone's data is protected by a fingerprint reader or arbitrary-length passcode, while your wallet's data is protected by the other person not having a knife.

Your wallet is protected by the other person not having a knife. Your cell phone's data is protected by the other person not being willing to use their knife to cut off one of your fingers. ;-)

Muggers are still stealing iOS devices, which people can just permanently brick via iCloud now, so I wouldn't expect that level of foresight!

Parts are parts and iOS devices have a lot of non-commodity parts that can't get "bricked".

I was under the impression we don't have international blacklisting, so there's still money to be made shipping handsets abroad?

Nope. TouchID doesn't work with a dead finger. Has to be alive.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/16/why-a-disembodied-finger-...

I wasn't really being serious. But in practice such liveness sensors are incredibly easy to defeat.

Can you prove that for TouchID specifically? You have to defeat both capacitance and RF sensors, btw. And remember, it needs to be "incredibly easy" by the standards of random unhinged violent criminals stupid enough to commit two felonies in order to secure a phone which will be completely useless within the 60 seconds or so it takes the victim to sign in with his Apple ID and brick the phone. Any bank accounts present on the device would also be nearly-instantly disabled.

By the time you defeat TouchID, the device will be useless anyway. It's more than secure enough.

https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2014/09/23/iphone-6-touchid-ha...

To be fair, if I've just lost a finger, it will take me considerably longer than 60 seconds to disable the phone.

Except for when it works with glue

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/chaos-computer-club-hac...

careful doing that, i know someone who had 2 cards with nfc and was getting charged double - surprised the system somehow allowed it

Edit: actually there has been a "tap to pay" available at many places. ... I had one that did, then its replacement card didn't, so there I was waving a non-tap card at a tap reader. The whole tech fizzled.

Argh. I had the same thing happen. Just after getting used to using the tap-to-pay card, my bank replaced it with a "dumb" card and I was back to swiping it.

Apple blocks 3rd party apps from using NFC. It's literally only usable in Apple Pay. Walmart can't implement it in an iOS app even if they wanted to.

What would implementing it in an iOS app even mean? If Walmart wants to support Apple Pay, they just need to use credit card terminals that can do NFC. Is the idea that if Walmart could implement it in their app, they could allow you to pay with some custom Walmart account instead of a credit card?

The point of companies having their own service like this, is so that the kickback to the charge company goes to them instead.

So instead of 1% of all mobile purchases going to Apple, it goes to walmart instead. With the scale of business Walmart had that can be upwards of a billion dollars a year.

Tesco in the UK have Scan-as-you-Shop, which sounds similar to your Scan-and-Go, the prime difference would be that you are given a dedicated device for doing the scanning rather than requiring you phone.

I've used this regularly for the past few months and had no real issues with it.

I think this is a common misperception regarding Apple Pay - it actually does not use disposable credit card numbers. Apple Pay generates a Device Account Number (DAN) once when you add a card to your phone's wallet. Thereafter, the same DAN is reused on that device for all transactions with that card.

So it actually does not do much to defeat merchant tracking, assuming you consistently use Apple Pay where it is available.

Indeed, and *Pay / CurrentC / Venmo / Square Cash / Dwolla are all just nice frontends for ACH.

"Apple (AAPL, Tech30) gets just 15 cents for every $100 in Apple Pay transactions, according to Gillis."[1]

In addition to the minor surcharge, there is the (opportunity) cost of Apple's hardware, the costs to vendors of supporting (yet) another platform, the consumer provides value to Apple in the form of consumer information, the consumer now has their fingerprint tied to payments, and then there is everything that goes along with the terms and conditions. Regarding the security, I'm not sure what the details are, but it seems that the attack surface is increased substantially. I'd personally prefer to have Visa, AmEx, etc reviewing and resolving fraud and other claims, seeing as how they've been doing it for decades and their bottom line depends on it, whereas Apple is relatively new to the game and Apple's bottom line does not depend on it.

Apple Pay might be awesome. Idk. But it's not "just a nice frontend for Visa, AmEx, etc., with better security".

[1]http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/26/technology/apple-pay/

You are very misinformed about Apple Pay, and the poster you are replying to is correct. CC networks pay the Apple Pay surcharge, not customers or vendors. To vendors, Apple Pay looks like a regular NFC transaction, except with a one-time card number, so there is no danger of the kind of hacks that happened to Target, Home Depot, and many other retailers. Apple has nothing at all to do with "reviewing and resolving fraud and other claims." The CC networks still do this.

When I buy a burrito and then look at a receipt (as I always do after buying a burrito) I do not see the visa surcharge, or any others. I see tax but that's it. At the end of the day, the consumer pays, because there is no free lunch, there are no free burritos.

I may have made an incorrect assumption regarding claims handling, though I'm not sure how that translates me to being "very misinformed".

I wasn't speaking only from the vendor perspective (idk what it looks like to them) or the Apple Pay customer's perspective (I'm not one of their customers) but I highly doubt it's worth my time to research to confirm that adding Apple Pay into the mix does not somehow increase the attack surface or how it does not somehow increase the amount of my personal information that is with Apple.

Nearly everything in your original comment is wrong. You say there's a "minor surcharge" but the cost to the vendor is the same as any other credit card. You mention the cost of supporting yet another platform, but the platform is just NFC, there's nothing special needed to support Apple Pay specifically. You say the consumer has their fingerprint tied to payments, but the fingerprint data never leaves the device. You say the attack surface is increased substantially, but Apple Pay is much more secure than using a credit card directly. (Not that consumers need to care, since fraud protection is 100%.) You imply that credit card companies aren't involved in resolving fraudulent Apple Pay transactions, but they are. You close by saying that Apple Pay isn't just a nice frontend for the card companies with better security, but that's precisely what it is.

I personally think this can rightly be described as "very misinformed."

>> there's nothing special needed to support Apple Pay specifically.

Yes, there is. NFC enabled terminals may be the norm at major chain stores but they do not have widespread adoption in smaller retail outlets.

The merchant pays for those terminals and they are not inexpensive. Sometimes $1000 or more. That tradeoff (making it slightly easier for you to pay) just isn't worth it to most merchants right now. As EMV adoption grows and merchants have to update their terminals to support that as well, NFC will grow.

Also, it may seem as if ApplePay is more secure for the banks as it prevents issues with data breaches but to date, it has not prevented any, will continue to only lessen the impact and is absolutely wrought with card fraud as there isn't any validation that you own the card you are loading into ApplePay. Once it's loaded it isn't checked by the merchant (if the merchant even pays attention these days) and is implicitly trusted by the network.

It took the UK a few years since contactless cards were launched around 2010. Everyone already had chip+pin terminals, and at first it was mostly coffee shops in London, but now many merchants have upgraded to contactless ones. It's not just national chains, but local shops too. It's much faster paying by contactless in a busy pub than paying cash.

It's possible there's pressure/support from Visa and MasterCard for small, local retailers to accept contactless payments. It's part of their advertising that you can buy a newspaper using the system, and most newsagents are local, independent shops.

A basic chip+pin (not contactless) terminal is available for £100 (or £3/month), I can't find a price for a contactless one.

The key word there is "specifically." Apple Pay may require technology that isn't 100% deployed, but it is a generic and standardized technology that long predates Apple Pay, not some new Apple-only technology that the boys in Cupertino came up with and foisted on the world.

I don't understand your security point at all. It hasn't prevented any breaches? How do you know? It doesn't validate cards you enter into Apple Pay? If you possess the card (or can make one from having possession of the card data) then you can already use it fraudulently, loading it into an iPhone is just an extra unnecessary step for the thief. The security advantage is that malicious terminals can't steal card data, and stealing your method of payment doesn't confer the ability to pay. It's not perfect by any means (and again, not something us consumers need to even care about), merely better than a regular plastic card.

> the consumer now has their fingerprint tied to payments

FUD. This is not how Touch ID works. Fingerprint data, which is not a fingerprint image to begin with, more of a hash, is stored on the iPhone's A_ chip itself. It cannot leave the device, ever.

Other posters have addressed the remainder of your incorrect claims.

I was not under the impression that Apple Pay users have an imprint of their finger print next to the transaction information and time and date stamp somewhere. That would be ridiculous. If the user validates a transaction using their fingerprint, somewhere it probably say something along the lines of "verified with user's fingerprint, which is not stored here." This creates what we call, linkages. It's not all in one place. That would, again, be ridiculous. But, the more linkages you have the better picture you can draw.

If you authorize your transactions with a PIN or a signature you're doing the same thing, but in a much less secure manner.

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