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MasterCard Forcing PayPal To Pay Higher Fees
iComp sends this quote from El Reg:
"PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit. The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for intermediated payment processors. This change is on the grounds that such processors don't share transaction details, which the card giants would love to get hold of as it can be used to research buying patterns and the like. Companies such as PayPal allow payments between users, so the party (perhaps a merchant) receiving the money doesn't need to be registered with the credit-card company. PayPal collects the dosh from the payer's card, and deducts a processing fee before passing the cash on to the receiving party. MasterCard would prefer the receiver to be registered directly so will apply the new fee from June to any payment that is staged in this way."
That is an insecure option since checks have your account number on them which can be used for fraudulent access to your money. PayPal's escrow through an email address is far safer.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
All banks and credit card companies have to do to kill PayPall forever is bring their transaction security model out of the 19th century.
What's worse is that they already have exactly that security model. Visa bought Orbiscom a few years ago. Orbiscom is the creater of "disposable" credit card numbers. You log into their system, specify a maximum limit and an expiration date and they generate a credit card number for you that is linked to your primary account. After a merchant charges that number it "binds" to them so that no ther merchants can charge it. Once the credit limit or expiration date is hit, the number stops working completely.
Only a handful of banks use this - Bonk of America is probably the biggest one, they call it "shopsafe." But the only reason they use it is that they inherited it when they bought MBNA. I've been using Shopsafe for nearly 15 years now for all of my online purchases and I've never had a problem. MBNA used to advertise that they never had even a single case of fraud with ShopSafe, I don't know if that's changed or if BoA is too stupid to continue advertising it that way.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Are you suggesting that Bitcoin is as safe as the USD? One of those still works when the lights go out...
Don't count on your paper US dollars working when the lights go out. I was in an area with an extended power outage -- the grocery store down the street had emergency generators to keep the freezers and lights on... but they couldn't get their cash register system up and were unable to make any sales (not even cash sales) until the registers came back up. It took most of a day to get the registers working.
In Europe (at least in Belgium and the Netherlands and probably in other countries as well) VISA, MasterCard nor any other credit card company will know what you used your card for.
They will see where you bought it, but not for what.
So if you pay with it at a supermarket, they will not know if you bought only alcohol or baby food or condoms.
In Belgium it is even illegal to do any analysis of what type of stores or how you use your credit card. So no analysis if you spend it in other countries, online, at gas stations or just for getting cash from a machine. (In the Netherlands this is allowed)
This all because of privacy and protection of the consumer and other communist shit. Yet those companies still make money.
So if Europe can do it, so should the US be able to pass a law for the people to not let credit card companies know this kind of detail (or any other type of company).
Also when I pay with my card, the company that I do my payment is not allowed to do anything with it. The companies I worked for were not able to do any analysis on credit card sales, because we only had the transaction number, the last four numbers of the card and some other stuff to make it possible to identify the sale, but not enough to link different sales to one person even when done with the same card.
Oh, and while you are at it, change to using the chip reader like the rest of the world. It is so much safer (not perfectly safe). If the rest of the world was able to pay for the change, I am sure you could bare the cost as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Check21 is why nobody with any sense uses checks anymore. The inability to get the check back after it's been processed makes it a lot more of a PITA to deal with forgeries than it used to be.