Thread

1. havaloc · 1790442549 · focus · HN ↗

   I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.

   Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).

   1. syvolt · 1790444937 · focus · HN ↗

      Or Apple Pay can just be like Google Wallet is on Android? The alternative is not multiple apps.

      1. add-sub-mul-div · 1790448179 · focus · HN ↗

         Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.

         1. jasode · 1790450329 · focus · HN ↗

            > is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.

            Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.

            The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)

            1. fsckboy · 1790532100 · focus · HN ↗

               >Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals.

               when I added my credit card to ApplePay, transactions made with the bare card would show up on my phone even though the phone was not involved: you're saying my phone has access to that transaction and Apple does not?

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