So... just watching the late night news, and seeing that these new RFI credit cards have quickly caught the attention of the thieves - no freakin' surprise! Who woulda thunk it?
So - the "advice" to the consumer is to take extra measures - buy new "special" wallets to protect your RFI card from being hijacked.
Wait just a minute here - did we - the consumer demand this "cool new card", or was it foisted on us by the credit card companies? Why should the consumer have to take *any* steps to protect themselves? Why would the credit card company not be liable for any fraud perpetrated from their latest (ill thought through...) "idea"?
Why are these credit card companies not held criminally liable for these ramifications? Should they not have anticipated this kind of event (it was kind of obvious...), and built in the protections for the consumer? So - the consumer will be the victim, and have to bear the cost of dealing with this - while Visa and MasterCard go blissfully on.
Using cash will never happen. People have gotten so lazy that they would say that it was easier to swip a card than to dig some moeny out of their wallet. It's not hard to believe that a lot of people out there have no idea how to keep a buget anymore since credit cards have appeared.
I have a better solution: a center punch (or nail set) and a hammer. Applied directly over the chip in the card. No more "new" security problems! You still have the same security problems you had before RFID technology, can't help you there. This same technology is in the new US passports. The govt kinda gets upset if you "fix" them though. Better go with the foil-lined wallets there.
I think you can relax a bit. Is this not the same Chip & pin that Europe has used for years? The one that cut fraud by 80%?
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having a credit car number does not get you anything. You still need a PIN or expiration date and security code. As for security and liability
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originally not liable by default The Chip and PIN implementation was criticised as designed to reduce the liability of banks in cases of claimed card fraud by requiring the customer to prove that they had acted "with reasonable care" to protect their PIN and card, rather than on the bank having to prove that the signature matched. Before Chip and PIN, if a customer's signature was forged, the banks were legally liable and had to reimburse the customer. Until 1 November 2009 there was no such law protecting consumers from fraudulent use of their Chip and PIN transactions, only the voluntary Banking Code. While this code stated that the burden of proof is on the bank to prove negligence or fraud rather than the cardholder having to prove innocence, [7] there were many reports that banks refused to reimburse victims of fraudulent card use, claiming that their systems could not fail under the circumstances reported, despite several documented successful large-scale attacks.
This changed on 1 November 2009 when legal, rather than voluntary, regulations came into force requiring banks to reimburse cardholders unless they could prove that the transaction was authorised by the cardholder.[6]
The contractor who built my house (When I lived in Texas) bought all the building materials through a credit card. That summer he and his wife vacationed in Hawaii from the air miles and cash back.
Let me provide some context for the "use cash" recommendation.
I have a high tech consultancy. About six months ago, I was contacted about providing services to help a number of large banking institutions implement the EMV smartcard standard. I brushed up on the technology and here's what I found out:
- Mastercard/Visa defined the standard for EMV but are themselves incapable of fully implementing it. Both the technology and, more importantly, the changes to their business processes are very complicated. Ditto Amex once they joined the party.
- This isn't just a technology that makes sure you are who you say you are. Fully implemented EMV would actually have full applications software running out of the smart chip. The real money isn't in charging you ATM fees, it's doing deep analytics on your buying and spending patterns and selling that information to marketing and retailing companies.
- Another unnamed player here is the National Security Agency. They are busy building an enormous data warehouse out West where they plan to capture pretty much anything electronic, encrypted or otherwise. They want to develop a complete view of who you are and what you do by connecting the trail of electronic litter you leave behind and they're doing this domestically without warrants or court supervision:
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Despite what you may see in the popular press, the Next Big Thing in technology isn't some game or the Facebook IPO. The NBT is here, it's called "Big Data". A ton of effort has gone into grinding through enormous piles of data to extract knowledge from noise. There's even a "free" open source project for this (Hadoop). Why is this a big deal? Because, in the past, your data trail was like finding a needle in a haystack. Now the needle hunters have tools that make this quite reasonable to do.
- If you have a modern car, it probably has GPS tracking built in. Your smartphone certainly can be used to track you. In fact, *every single keystroke you type is captured* is you use an iPhone or Android device.
- The combination of realtime data capture like EMV combined with Big Data mining tools, and implemented by government agencies without a bit of legal restraint means that ... YOU HAVE NO PRIVACY. Everything you say, everywhere you go, and everything you do is now available both to Big Brother Government and every private sector corporation with enough money to buy the data.
The short and the long of it is that privacy is dead unless you're able to completely go off grid ... which is impractical. Using cash when you can will reduce your data footprint noticeably but at the end of the day, you and your behaviors are essentially on display in the middle of town. The only hope we really have is to count on the complexity of all this stuff slowing down adoption considerably. That's certainly been true for the regional banks and point-of-sale retailers but it ain't true for the NSA. They're smart, they have lots of (our) money, they don't much care about legal fine points like warrants, and the Obama Department Of Justice is pretty much ignoring it all.
IOW ... We're Doomed ...
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I do use cash.....theirs...for approximately 28 days. :-) And I get cash back. I once had a GM card where I accumulated a $4600 credit on a new GM vehicle. When I dickered the price down to as low as I could and then agreed to buy, the salesman nearly choked when I told him about my $4600 credit.
You're a bit behind times, Bubba ... it is not the next big thing, we in fact are well past that leading edge.
This is exactly what Facebook, and Google, have been intent on since coming onto the scene, collecting that "big data" is both entities sole reason for existence ... Google is especially adept at it due to the opportunities their search engine algorithms provide, as well as their mobile Android OS. It is, in fact, the wellspring of Google's revenue.
Facebook are still newbies at the game and Google is lightyears ahead of them in that aspect, despite Facebook's 900,000,000 user base
Anyone who uses a smart phone, along with the apps that run on same, Android and IOS, are, in some cases unwittingly, also providing the grist for the "big data" mill.
Right now, collection is being driven by advertisement revenues, but that is only the tip of the iceberg since the government realized a good while ago that they needed to be in the game.
But you're right .... reading, and understanding, TOS' is getting both more and more important, and more and more futile.
We moved over 700 miles about 9 months ago. The credit card was the only way to pay the movers. The last time I moved, many years ago, we had to have a certified check for the cost when the movers picked up the furniture. This was bad for two reasons. One it was inconvenient trying to get to the bank while you are trying to complete other things that had to be done as part of the move, and having that large of a check in the insecure situation. Two: The movers were then responsible for carrying the large negotiable check around in their truck. We also got a large number of "Thank you points" for the transaction.
I am a Republican and know the need for a budget whether personal, a business or a country, so we do 90% of our purchases by credit card. I can down load the transactions, and see exactly where our money is going. I can easily see when one of the categories is going out of line.
I did the same but in 1997, $3600 IIRC the salesmen did not care, the dealership was not loosing any money, they simply collected that amount directly from that GM entity. And truly I am not sure the salesman ever knew about that credit as that was all handled in the closing/finance office. Pleas write us a check for "X" - $3600 and please verify that you want to take your credit at this time with the GM Card rep on our telephone.
describing the 90's as the decade of information/data.
But that's not what I was talking about. "Big Data" is something relatively new. Google kicked it off, but it's really hit its stride outside Google (and government) within the last year or two. In the 1990s we were talking about gigabytes. In the 2000s it was petabytes. We're now at exabytes and mining data at that scale has never before been practical until very recently. The other thing that's changed is the ubiquity of "smart" devices - phones, credit cards, cars, appliances, and so on. Assuming someone has access to these devices via some network connection, they are all providers of new data to be mined.
If you know what you are doing, you can avoid being a marketing info goldmine through rooting and modding your phone. My phone is rooted with a ROM with CIQ removed and I have disabled all location services.
I know they can still gather location information, simply by my usage of the phone (cell tower location) and probably via other methods, but the utility of these phones is amazing and enough for me to accept the intrusions into my privacy.
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