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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

I like how the article never mentions the reception that the competitor, CurrentC, has received. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/currentc/id912922036?mt=8

Design fail:

    Why should anyone have to grant access to
    their personal checking account, health data
    and allow tracking of their purchases!?

I wish I could give less stars:

    This app would only provide me with less
    security and less convenience.

Horrible mobile payment:

    you think Target and Home Depot breaches
    were bad? Wait until those hackers got a
    hold of your bank account and drain it!

View on HN

Oh but it gets worse.

Apple Pay is very accessible because of it's design, but CurrentC isn't. http://stevensblog.org/apple-pay-rejections/

But don't worry the CurrentC app is horrible for people without any accessibility issues. They want your driver's license and Social Security numbers. http://twitter.com/hasanahmad80/status/526551322523623424/ph...

TechCrunch walked through how this terrible app works and what data it wants including: location (OK), health & medical (WHAT?), browser history, phone & text logs.

And who needs security? Its privacy policy only shows that it may share data with carriers, ad networks, consumer data resale, analytics, government, and others.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/25/currentc/

Financial account providers are required to ask for personal identifiers as a result of the USA PATRIOT Act. You have to provide your SSN when you apply for a credit card or bank account, as well.

As for the rest...yeah, seems a bit much.

I'd forgotten about that. Are they actually providing an account though? I thought they were just storing a card on file, the way Amazon does. Is it because they're using ACH?

Yeah, you're providing checking account details, not credit card details. The system is intended to "cut out the middleman", where the middleman is those nasty credit card companies taking their cut of every sale.

Perhaps they'll start their own bank so you can open a checking account with CVS and use that account for your high risk CurrentC trading (NB: there's already an app on the iTunes App Store called Current C which is a currency conversion calculator).

I guess if they have ACH access they have everything they need to launder money so the rules would apply. The only ACH thing I have setup is my paycheck and it wouldn't have phased me to give my SSN at that time.

This whole thing is just so amazingly tone-deaf of a move. They don't want you to use Apple Pay, they want you to use something that doesn't even exist outside private beta, so they take away your choice.

On the other side of the equation, Wells Fargo is offering $20 for trying Apple Pay with their cards.

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/27/wells-fargo-apple-pay-cr...

The app got featured on Reddit's Apple and Android subreddits and readers were encouraged to post bad reviews, so I wouldn't read it as "public" reception, although I do agree the app is suboptimal to put it generously. Most reviews in the last few days were most probably posted by people who didn't like Apple Pay/Google Wallet being removed as an option.

All of these centralized solutions require a massive amount of trust in order to work. It's fairly obvious that any pull-based route is encumbered by so much counterparty risk that it simply cannot scale without a fairly massive amount of insurance to support the product.

That's funny ... how long can and will this consortium flagrantly piss off their customers?

The reviews on Google Play don't look much better: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.currentc

All of those reviews are from the last few days after the news came out. I doubt any of them are real users.

It's in closed beta, so of course it's unlikely that these are real users. That doesn't make the comments less true.

>That doesn't make the comments less true.

It doesn't. What it does is give us less reason to believe that the comments are true.

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