@matt companies wouldn’t steal passwords, but I bet you they would monetize the hell out of the transactions you were doing in a wallet app because it would not be feasible for a small company to negotiate a transacting fee, and nobody would pay for such an app. Other developers would be banks, and they fuck you for no other reason than that they can.
@matt I mean, who in their right capitalistic mind would make bank transaction fully private like Apple did? Only a company that makes enough money in some other way.
@stevenodb I think this really leans into the “only Apple does this” myth I wrote about a few weeks ago. Other wallets exist today (Shop Pay and PayPal are far more popular than Apple Pay, for example), and Apple’s privacy practices are industry standard. We’re not talking about allowing other wallets, we’re talking about other wallets getting to do in-person payments as well as e-commerce’s like they already can.
Out of curiosity, when you say “fully private” what does that mean in practice?
@matt I closed my PayPal account after a few concerning direction changes (like charging account if not used for a while).
Fully private (although this has been somewhat debunked) like not sharing your payment information with merchants. Meaning it’s harder to identify me for ad tracking.
The whole mess of ad tracking on the web has made me very cynical of any company on the web. Maybe that’s clouding my judgement.
@stevenodb Yeah, the thing on the privacy angle that gets me is that Apple is using industry standard practices that literally everyone else uses as well for masking your “true” card number. Apple Pay passes your name, address, and products just like other payment methods as well, and your bank of course still knows everything you do.
I will also note for the record you example of a bad player is one that failed a decade ago 😝
@stevenodb Fun note about CurrentC, I was in the beta for that back in 2015 and there was no NDA or agreements, so wrote about it and it’s the one time I was threatened with possible legal action for posting something on my site. I put it back up once they dissolved https://birchtree.me/blog/currentc/
In fairness to them, this did serve as a kick off for Target Cartwheel (now Circle), which had been massively successful and popular with customers, even though it’s still QR-code based and can’t use NFC.
@matt I meant that like, if CurrentC had made it. Mobile payments might have worked out differently from the system that Apple helped bootstrap or at least popularize.
@stevenodb IMO it's an example of a less good user experience losing in the market. I will say that choosing Apple as the first company to do digital wallets that mask your real card data is pretty specific. I'd go with earlier wallets that implemented the DPAN spec Apple uses, and PayPal earlier than that.
@stevenodb And I hope my position is clear that I don't dislike Apple Wallet by any means, I think it's great! My beef is mostly with Apple having the authority to ban other companies from competing and with instances of Apple doing industry-standard stuff but being held up as the only ones who do things.
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