Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Autofill Wants To Store Users' Credit Card Info
cagraham writes "Facebook has teamed up with payment processors PayPal, Braintree, and Stripe, in an attempt to simplify mobile payments. The system allows Facebook members (who have turned over their credit and billing info) to click a 'Autofill with Facebook' button when checking-out on a mobile app. Facebook will then verify the details, and securely transfer a user's info over to the payment processing company. The move is likely aimed at gathering more data on user behavior, which can be used to increase the prices Facebook charges for mobile ads. Whether or not the feature takes off however, will depend almost entirely on how willing users are to trust Facebook with their credit card data."
Those two names invoked in the same sentence makes me feel a little ill. Nothing but bad experiences with both, what could possibly go wrong with them teaming up?
Why would I trust them with anything else?
It's as if they're honestly trying to get everyone to delete their facebook account. I've been considering it almost daily for the past couple years, definitely more in the past several months. The only thing keeping me on there is how much of my family resides far from my current location.
Kind of makes you wonder, "How much do I really like my cousins?" I'm very close to saying, "Not enough to keep this account."
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I look forward to the "300million credit card details stolen" stories posted on here in a few years. And the stories of "Our Son spent 20,000 USD on crap DLC" every 5 months.
Given the deep contempt that Facebook demonstrates toward even the idea of personal privacy, I don't think I would want to trust them with my credit cards.
Fair enough. Add in a new user agreement, in large blinking red letters at the top, so the user doesn't even have to scroll past pages of deliberately obfuscating boilerplate, "Facebook will do this for you. In exchange we will gather buying info tied to your purchases through us to sell ads targetted to your buying habits. Truth be told, we don't care if you buy Depends or urine catheters or Justin Bieber tix, it's all done automatically by computer aggregate anyway."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What additional harm could a 16-digit string cause when people happily and willingly furnish Facebook with their full name, sex, DOB, address, pictures, employer's name, former employer's name, school, friends' and relatives' names, hobbies, personal preferences, real-time location, etc.?
Facebook wants to index your credit card transactions for you..... Please fill in your online banking passwords. You can trust them with your data you know....
Anyone who willingly opts into this is a friggin moron.
I can understand some cases where having a Facebook account or a Paypal account is a necessary evil (mostly emphasis on "evil").
But both of these services display an almost nonexistent regard for their user bases, with Paypal going so far as to actually steal money from its users (locking out accounts with cash in them for months on end and continuing to profit from the interest, fraudulently attempting to hoover out users' bank accounts, etc).
But hey, if you want these two to potentially ruin your life by bankrupting you and reporting about it online, go ahead!
I'll just sit back and laugh at you derisively.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"Five other Visa holders like this website! Here are thumbnails of their credit cards."
Hi Guys!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is part of a bigger play by Facebook. Most mail accounts in use right now are password SMTP over TLS/SSL. Yet most services on the net assume that people are in full control of their primary mailboxes. By going multi-factor on their login system, Facebook wants to establish their messaging system as a more secure, more trusted endpoint (especially for the average user with zero understanding of password hygiene) than good old email. Once they do so, and get their users trained up softly-softly on multi-factor authentication, they then quietly pitch to organizations and service providers (banks, government services, utilities, ...) to request Facebook, rather than email, as the preferred primary mechanism for staying in touch with customers.
After all, if Facebook accounts are harder to spoof than an email address -- and with the continual life history & social graph data they contain, they surely are -- why wouldn't an organization want to stay in touch with its customers that way? From the point of view of a big org concerned with identity theft and fraud prevention, it's surely a tempting way to arrange things. Facebook owns your digital identity and theirs, phishing becomes much more difficult to execute as senders are authenticated & easily verified.