Hacked Screenshots Show Friend-To-Friend Payments Feature in Facebook Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Hacked Screenshots Show Friend-To-Friend Payments Feature in Facebook Messenger

techcrunch.com

33 pointswhbk32 comments

The first thing I thought when reading the headline was:

Yeah, let's give the most intrusive facebook app ever access to creditcard details wcgw!

How is the app overly intrusive?

I doubt average the average facebook user feels that way

You missed the outrage when Facebook forced users to switch to Messager: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/08/facebook-messenger-pr...

Given how important Facebook is to so many people (plus just the sheer size of its userbase) I literally do not think it is possible for them to make any changes whatsoever that do not provoke some sort of backlash. If they merged Messenger back into the main app there would certainly be an uproar over that as well.

That's not entirely true - they forced me to uninstall the app and just use the website on my mobile browser.

Depressingly I am pretty sure it's a better UX than the app was - just without notifications.

While some of the more sensationalist parts of this were debunked, here [1] is the article that goes over a critical (non-technical) analysis of the binary itself.

The app uses some private Apple APIs, including capturing the SSID of your wireless network.

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/facebooks-messenger-a...

I thought Apple automatically scanned and rejected apps for private API usage

Most likely FB will have an exception agreement with Apple. With their amounts of cash they can easily buy anything...

They do. You can get around this with a little trickery, since they just scan for calls to specific method signatures.

I find it surprising that Apple puts up with blatant and conscious violations of their rules from such a high profile app.

With risk of coming off like that guy... This is why I would prefer bitcoin for something like this. I don't want to give someone my credit card and trust that they will only charge what I ask them. And I think in the long run, more people would use these kinds of services if they didn't have to do that.

A friend to friend payment system in facebook messenger is a killer. Now i want to see what will be the move of all the p2p money sending apps, as many are coming up with it here in India. Excited to test it.

This is huge. Social payments could be the biggest business model for Facebook and even blast their revenues way past $100B. Lots of startups, many great ones have attempted it before, but all failed due to lack of traction. Facebook doesn't have this problem and could thus bring social payments finally to success.

This is where we will now be able to see how much TRUST affects a company. The Facebook brand is currently viewed as very negative and could be the reason, why this business model could be completely rejected by its users.

To your point, PayPal is also seen as a very negative brand and they continue to thrive.

The question I have is if this is an attempt to take away PayPal's market or add to it...that is unclear to me. If you've done a boosted post or an advertisement on facebook, you know you can pay via PayPal. I, for one, won't enter a credit or debit card but would do this if I could link it to Pp.

...but then again, it is not often I owe my friends money.

This strikes me more as a tentative to increase users-value by coming out with cool stuff that would tie them to a credit card.

I kind of would expect them to acquire Venmo before trying to build this. Venmo already has a lot of traction in this area.

Venmo is already owned by Braintree, which is owned by PayPal.

I wasn't aware of that actually. Seems like everyone I know is using Venmo already - including having it linked to their bank accounts. Not sure I would trust FB with my bank information.

Would like an open standard defined for bank account integration. Unfortunately that's unlikely to happen given the mass amounts of banks and their relationship with credit-card companies. (ie Why implement bank-to-bank transfers where there's no margin to be made in comparison to credit-cards?)

In the UK we have recently standardised on PayM for mobile transfers keyed by phone number. It's actually pretty good. Barclays PingIt was the earlier player here.

Im excited for this. When hanging out with friends we will often get a pizza or something of that nature but it is always determined by who has cash on them, its not going to be a hassle anymore reimbursing them to the exact penny for each persons share because they are all in the FB ecosystem.

Yes we can certainly all breathe easier now! I know when I'm out with friends my enjoyment is so often ruined by the worry that the accounting isn't balanced to the penny.

Well that just isn't very nice.

To be fair I'd really like to see this implemented. Pitching in on gifts/dinner/tickets would be so much easier with this rather than having to give my bank account number out and checking for payment..

Because there aren't dozens of other ways to do this already..

There were tons of search engines before Google came along. Uber had existed, why use Lyft? You get the idea...

> because they are all in the FB ecosystem

Ya dozens of app's to make them install or I could let them know about a feature on an app that every single person I am friends with uses.

As long as all these new payment platforms like this, apple pay, and square use credit cards, i don't really consider them that innovative. different way to skin the same cat.

Good lesson to remind my developers to stop putting WIP of unannounced features in release builds.

Depends. Maybe the production version is used for testing the feature, but is only enabled for certain users.

Good point, I hadn't considered that. Made the comment mainly because we had an incident a few weeks back where a client saw a bunch of stuff in a production version that was definitely never supposed to see the light of day and put us in a very awkward position.

Yeah, I remember a HN post a couple of weeks ago about FB where they do A/B testing with their users in the app.

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