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Comment by lozenge | Hacker News Reader

Klarna is just a payment option, and one which is a line of credit too. You could have just selected a different method surely?

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It depends.

Some merchants offer PayPal or Card or Klarna as options on the first part of checkout. Those are fine.

Some merchants though, have given their entire checkout process to Klarna and the card and other options are downstream of entering the Klarna checkout process. This means that you'll have the date of birth question, and also be sending your transaction data to a credit company, even if you're still paying fully by debit card.

Two examples I recently encountered were UK PC parts merchant, I've being sponsoring a child of an impoverished single mum ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NCHV1pcTyvtbbE-mBDFhE1K7... ) and he'd managed to earn enough to purchase a custom computer - he's only 12 and this is such an achievement. We used pcpartpicker to design the build, and two of the suppliers recommended by that in the UK have fully given up their checkout process to Klarna. I switched ordering those parts to Scan and Box instead.

Wow, then presumably those merchants will likely fail, or they will spot the negative impact of Klarna in time (before failure) and switch to something else, or Klarna will change their checkout process to address this issue.

Or, as with anything else privacy related, outside of intellectual bubbles like HN the vast majority of people don't think twice about giving up unnecessary PII to a payment processor because they naively think the entity won't sell or leak their information. Even those who see conspiracies around every corner somehow constantly fall victim to identity theft due to negligence, and divulge way too much information for their own privacy and safety every day.

A movie quote springs to mind: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

Or as is even more often the case with HN:

In practice, “Date of Birth mandatory” is a merchant controlled setting in Klarna [0]. I’ve used Klarna for card countless times and never hit a site that requires it. I’m guessing GP saw it once and never bothered to update his dataset (a surprisingly coming problem among us intellectuals)

[0] https://www.klarna.com/assets/sites/6/2021/09/20095942/user_...

Nice.

So I've followed up and called one of the retailers to ask why it's mandatory and got "We use Klarna and Klarna requires it, but you can enter a fake one and still get through as it's not verified.". This is awd-it.co.uk which was one of the two merchants in which I encountered it.

I suspect they're wrong though, and that you are right. Klarna didn't require this, but someone at this company configured it. Perhaps it's something about PC components for gaming computers, some kind of data gathering that helps protect against kids using their parents card.

There wasn't a way that I could configure not to give it though... I'm just a customer. Whilst I could use a fake date I'm more likely to treat this as a "your data is about to go to another third party" red flag and shop elsewhere still.

Thanks for the info. I wonder if, now or at some point in the past, Klarna had mandatory customer DOB as opt-out rather than opt-in for a default card processing setup on the merchant facing side, and many small businesses in my experience either don't have IT staff or it's their cousin's wife's uncle doing IT for them on the cheap, and they just don't see it or understand its significance.

I know there were dozens of switches to flip when we switched to a new storefront and shopping cart vendor a few years ago, and I missed a few initially despite my experience with setting those up in the past. That's what sandboxing is designed to catch, but I can picture PHBs in every industry saying "damn the testing, full speed ahead!" with no thought for consequences.

Willing to share which merchants so we know who to avoid in future?

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