MS Passport and... Visa

HeUnique writes "Well, people have seen it coming. According to this story Microsoft is extending the Passport authentication system to process Credit card payment (currently: Visa and MasterCard) through a deal with Arcot Systems. Of course, with the ever-changing privacy terms that some companies keep changing without notifying their user - it won't take much long until they'll take your credit cards info for 'verification' and who knows what they'll do with it.. sigh.." In a nutshell: "Microsoft and Arcot plan to offer, later this fall, a service that will let banks require computer users to type in their Passport username and password to authenticate Visa or MasterCard credit cards." Take the word "require" in that sentence with a grain of salt, I guess. Favorite quote: "People will start trusting the system now that it's linked to credit cards." Sure.

Comments

ha, ha, ha, levels of non choice.

[Erris]

My wife, who pays all my bills, already has a passport account thanks to hotmail. I'd give her a real mail account on my own computers, but Cox blocks port 25 so I can't run a mail server. She loves comercial crap sites that bomb her with adverts, cookies and other obnoxious junk, and complains enough when one of them won't display something "properly." I can't wait until she can't log into the bank anymore and has to go back to balancing the books by hand.

That's all in the future, however. I'm sure M$ will make the transition to where nothing but IE TX (Total eXtortion). We don't buy much over the web now, so we won't miss much when a few stupid sites decide they don't want our money. Eventually, as Visa put's all it's weight behind this and closes down other competitors it will start to feel painful. Then it will hurt to have the company site say, IE only. Our bank's site is already M$ encumbered, but still works with Netscape 4.7. Soon enough, I'm sure that won't be the case. All M$ has to do is flick a switch in server crap they sell my bank. At that time, our big fat national bank credit card company might use this as an advantage to destroy our local bank and try to get us to direct deposit my pay check to them, as they might not have that switch flipped.

All maner of convinence will be lost, but I will not trust a M$ computer on my network much less let it manipulate my money.