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Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it should be a law that you can't provide information to someone about what their their customers/employees are doing out of your own accord. Credit card companies have no business in knowing what their customers are buying. They should just process the payment with the minimum amount of information possible.

Turning private entities into investigator and judge isn't good for anyone. It ends up in a game of who can annoy them the most, and the entity will be wasting time trying to appease both sides.

Leave these things to the government. At least then you need evidence and have due process.

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As far as I know steam doesn't share what you bought on the transaction - it just says you spent it on steam.

What's happened here is that someone has complained it's visible on the store at all.

I mean that they told Visa/Mastercard that the client Steam/Steam customers are selling/buying certain types of products. Now that they are aware of it, they can be pressed to do something about it. Conversely, if they weren't made aware about it, they could just go on with their business as usual.

Personally I think it's better for private entities to stay neutral and leave political decisions to the government. It's hard to stay neutral about things when you know things are happening, so when you inform a private entity about what people are doing with their services, you are turning that private entity into a political entity.

Fair, although it would be better if the banks had some equivalent of section 230 protection from having to do anything about what they're processing, maybe.

Or do something to make it so that payment processors must process payments for anything legal, without any say in the matter.

Probably get sued up to the Supreme Court like pharmacists that don't want to accept birth control prescriptions. Which may not work out that great with how much the current court hates freedom.

but, really, if the product or service is legal, payment processors should have to accept the payment. Same for all the other categories of product they are blocking with similar methodos.

The worst thing about this situation is that it's legitimizing cryptocurrencies.

So many gamers are going to get scammed in the next months... all because a payment processor couldn't just do its job.

What if it is unclear. I cannot tell 100% if a girl between 12 and 32 is over 18. maybe I can be right 75% of the time but I can think of two girls at the extreems that I was way off (that is a girl I guessed was 12 turned out to be 27 and a different girl I guessed at 32 won an under 16 race). Fake ids are all over (because 18-20 year olds want to drink at college).

ontil we legally give payment processors a pass for enabling money for crime they will be very careful about grey areas.

Why would it be on the payment processor at all to determine if something is legal or not? I think that is a massive issue on it's own as I don't want Visa/MC deciding whether they think what I'm doing with my money is legal, that's for a legal system to do, not a private company.

> Credit card companies have no business in knowing what their customers are buying.

The US Treasury says otherwise: this seems to all have started from them trying to blame Visa/MC for "directly handling the proceeds of these illicit transactions", despite the payment processors not having any idea what was actually being purchased.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-whistleblower-says-maste...

Everyone is doing their job as private entities with their own standards... except the government who are supposed to break up monopolies.

I blame elizabeth warren.

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