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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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