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Comment by alephnan | Hacker News Reader

> having credit cards on file is conveniently closer to making more money

It will be a drastic change to pivot the company from one where the customer is the product to the customer.

Credit card input also introduces friction and bounce rate of user signup. This would hurt Facebook's user growth and MAU KPIs

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Facebook's customers are advertisers, not users.

You're right. I've been in the weeds analyzing the finances of tech companies where the users of the apps are actual customers, and the term 'user' weren't as nice

People already make accounts with phone numbers, I suspect credit cards won't be different.

It's a bit easier to memorize a phone number than a credit card number.

The number of active credit card holders in the UK is somewhere in the 35 million range. The number of adults is somewhere over 56 million. There is quite a mismatch there. Unlike the US, owning a credit card is not standard for most people in the world.

People tend to get them for online shopping abroad, and for travels out of their currency zone as a back up.

I don’t know if a debit card counts, because they are 16+. Many of us took a while to move onto credit cards but still had access to cashless, online and overseas payment.

> I don’t know if a debit card counts, because they are 16+.

11+ with parental permission. I had one around that age.

It's credit card OR id though. People like Experian are already offering age verification systems that check passports, driving licences etc. The government also have their own GOV.UK Verify programme which has multiple providers which prove identity and thus age.

If you can login to your government tax account, or apply for a DBS, you'll be able to prove your identity.

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