Why Apple Pay could be the mobile-payment system you'll actually use
macworld.com
macworld.com
I know Google wallet creates a virtual credit number, but that remains "permanent", so in terms of tracking, it's not that much different than using the real credit number. It protects you against theft, but not tracking.
Now that I know this kind of tokenization is possible (and more importantly acceptable by the financial industry) even if I'm not going to be in the Apple ecosystem, I'm not going to use anything else that doesn't use the same method.
If you're worried about merchant-level tracking, I think tokenization makes little or no difference. Quoting from the article:
"Tokenization is typically handled by the payment network, which (in some implementations) encrypts the credit card number right when you swipe it, sends it back for the token, and then provides that to the merchant to keep for things like refunds or customer tracking."
The only potential merchant-level tracking difficulty I can see is that tokens can be merchant-specific, which might make unified customer tracking more difficult after a merger. And even if financial institutions didn't provide services like post-merger token-matching (something I wouldn't bet on), plenty of merchants have quite a bit of experience using other signals to approximate that kind of matching.
(Contactless MSD doesn't either - it normally sends something like "VALUED CUSTOMER" or "NOT AVAILABLE")