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Comment by siculars | Hacker News Reader

I use Apple pay wherever possible. It is far quicker and more convenient than either cash, chip card or swipe in that order.

Besides convenience, security and privacy are the backstop for my usage. I just trust Apple more to not be sleezy with my transaction history.

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Re: Privacy: Cash is the most privacy friendly payment method. Followed by virtual credit cards, which aren't really that private but an improvement over the usual.

Here with Apple Card, even if Apple might not choose to centralise your payment data, the underlying network (MasterCard, in this case) most certainly can know where you spent it, and vendors at point of sale can keep track of it too.

They know that SOMEONE spent money at a location, they won't know who it was.

AML laws are a thing. Someone in the chain definitely knows who it was. The payment network for sure, as well as any associated banks, and Apple, clearly. The merchant can see whatever their payment processor chooses to share with them.

With the new Apple Card, somewhere in the presentation Apple had "Goldman Sachs will never sell your data to third parties" but what about the MasterCard backend? Surely, they'll see exact transactions and store information?

They explained this in the keynote. They are generating a per-transaction card number, so there is no reasonable way for Mastercard to track what a certain person is buying.

What they described was card tokenization via the existing EMV standard for contactless payments.

  * Tokenization is using a unique per-device credit card.  These are generated by the payment network, so Mastercard knows who is making the payment.
  * EMV includes per-transaction tokens.

At no point did Apple say anything the prevents MasterCard from tracking your purchases. MasterCard shares this data with the credit networks, and the credit networks sell this data to third parties.

yes, goldman sachs and mastercard will most certainly data mine the information to correlate transactions to each other and to certain people. it won't be perfect, but it's not truly anonymous either.

Thanks for the insight. So, now the question is whether GoldmanSachs can be trusted. Honestly, Apple is the only large company in existence that I can fully trust with my privacy. Given that this whole thing has been orchestrated by Apple, it wouldn't be too surprising for Apple to put preventative measures around GoldmanSachs based on their sleezy history.

doesn't say GS won't mine the data themselves for marketing.

I'm not as much of a fan of it with faceID as I was with touchID. Double tapping the lock button is awkward.

> Double tapping the lock button is awkward.

I agree with this. Maybe it's because I still have trauma from broken power buttons (back in the iPhone 4 era), but I'd like to not have to press buttons as much as possible.

Face ID for me is a godsend. For some reason, fingerprint sensors on Apple, Samsung, and OnePlus devices just don't work for me.

Hooray for FaceID!!!

Opposite for me. FaceID makes the activation so much quicker.

Compared to touching the Touch ID sensor?

yes, the touch ID sensor was near my fingers, the lock button is far from my fingers.

Me too. But isn’t it annoying when gas pumps still ask you to enter your zip code?

> I just trust Apple more to not be sleezy with my transaction history.

For now. They are all still collecting and storing all the data. The only solution is lack of data collection to begin with.

How are you supposed to see if there have been fraudulent charges if no one is collecting a list of previous charges?

cash > applepay > tap > swipe > chip > debit

cash is the most convenient secure and private form of payment. applepay if i run out of cash or its a larger transaction. chip (in the US) is hobbled by stupid UX (insert card, tap random buttons, sign, etc.), so swipe is usually quicker and more reliable. i never use debit.

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