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>This removes the risk of fraud and theft by employees skimming numbers from your card and from corporate DB breaches

Why not just follow the rest of the world and actually implement Chip and PIN instead? All the security benefits with none of the privacy drawbacks.

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It's far from 'the rest of the world.' The United States has far more POSes than any other country that has fully implemented Chip and PIN. Considering even small countries have only switched over in the past few years, it's far from surprising that the US hasn't transitioned yet.

That being said, Chip & PIN is making inroads in the US. Visa is doing its liability shift in October of this year, which should make it more attractive to vendors.

I think i'm supposed to point out here that NZ (and Aus) has had a free national POS system in place since the 1980s called EFTPOS. really weird traveling in the 90s and having to start thinking about cash again... It works wonderfully - that's typically a cue to start buggerising around with it and we've just started that adventure with contactless credit cards that don't need PIN codes - what's the worst that could happen? ;-)

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