> The fact that tons and tons of what constitutes the backend of modern finance tech is the exact same shit that was originally built in the 70's is not something that I think can be overlooked so easily.
Which is the thing enabled by moving the responsibility somewhere else. Because then their customers don't care, and the industry doesn't lose business to an alternative by failing to improve security.
> Your social security number (if you're American) for example is basically a unified ID number that corresponds to everything from your medical records to your credit report to bank accounts to insurance, on and on, and accessing information with that number is nearly completely insecure.
Which is why it should never be used for authentication, and isn't for companies with reasonable security, and doesn't have to be. You authenticate the user with passwords, cryptography, one-time email tokens, etc., not unchangeable not-so-secret numbers shared across all institutions. But see above regarding what causes them to not care about security.
What we could have done, and maybe still should, is limit social security numbers to use as a tax ID and ban their use for any other purpose. Why does your healthcare provider need your social security number? They can issue their own patient ID if they need something like that, and then if that gets compromised it limits the scope of what it can be used for.
> But we have advanced so much since then and yet EFTs despite just being like... digital checks remain basically inaccessible to working class people, despite them being objectively useful and, again, literally just checks in a different form.
So this is also part of the scam.
Credit cards charge the merchant ~3%. That's way more than the cost of handling chargebacks, especially because they also put the cost of chargebacks on the merchant. But then the finance industry doesn't want to make EFT easier to use, because then merchants would want to use it instead of paying 3% to the credit card companies, who are really the same companies and therefore drag their heels in making EFT easy to use.
And the chargebacks are part of what enables this, because the customer might be willing to use a more secure payment system in order to save 3%, if they had any reason to care about security. The other part is credit card rewards programs, which make the user think they're getting rewards, when really they're paying twice that much or more to the credit card companies for the transaction.