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Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

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Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#281

Post by michael_storm »

gizmo686 wrote: post #260
URSpider94 wrote: post #224

I think people are over-thinking this offering a little too much. People who are asking if the company will resist a subpoena, or if all customer data will be irreversibly encrypted, are expecting too much. The main purposes of this product are to be able to mask your marketing data (name, address, phone) to businesses, and to mitigate damage in the event of a data breach (any stolen card numbers are useless). It's n…

>Finally, I am very skeptical of their claim about walking away from subscriptions and trials. Sure, in theory, you make it much harder for vendors to track you down, but by law, you're agreeing to pay for the company's services when you accept their agreement. I am not sure about this. One could argue that you by signing up for the recurrent payment (or the free trial with automatic payed renewal), you merely consen…

What? You didn't "merely consent" to anything; you agreed to their terms and conditions, which state cancellation criteria. There's no "one could argue" here. Commercial law is well-established. Of course they have recourse: taking you to collections.

Have you... have you ever not paid a bill before? I'm very confused how one could think this.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#282

Post by tedmiston »

cubano wrote: post #85
tedmiston wrote: post #24

My biggest question with Privacy, and of any one-time use credit card numbers service, is always: Will it affect my rewards? Will businesses still show up unaffected with the same categories on my credit card statement? (I have a travel rewards only card, so breaking the rewards flow is a deal-breaker for using a higher level service.) Edit: I misunderstood the service as being able to be layered on top of normal cre…

Don't you see that rewards tracking is actually the antithesis of this service? That's what those "free" rewards really are...getting more detailed information on your spending patterns and profile so they can resell that info to interested parties.

As others pointed out with the % splitting, I'm not sure that I agree.

A credit card company could collect spending information and resell it for all cardholders, not just those holding cards having good rewards.

Perhaps this is naive and instead more valuable customers (based on spending more money annually or having a higher credit score to qualify for the card in the first place) have their information sold more, but privacy and reward programs seem like orthogonal aspects of the business to me.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#283

Post by gizmo686 »

michael_storm wrote: post #281
gizmo686 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Finally, I am very skeptical of their claim about walking away from subscriptions and trials. Sure, in theory, you make it much harder for vendors to track you down, but by law, you're agreeing to pay for the company's services when you accept their agreement. I am not sure about this. One could argue that you by signing up for the recurrent payment (or the free trial with automatic payed renewal), you merely consen…

What? You didn't "merely consent" to anything; you agreed to their terms and conditions, which state cancellation criteria. There's no "one could argue" here. Commercial law is well-established. Of course they have recourse: taking you to collections. Have you... have you ever not paid a bill before? I'm very confused how one could think this.

If we are talking about something like a phone bill, where you may incur charges during billing period and pay at the end, then you are correct and the company can take you to court because you are in debt to them for services provided that you have not paid for.

If we are talking about subscriptions where you pay for a month of service up front, then there is no debt. If they fail in charging another month to the provided credit card, then they are under no obligation to renew your subscription. Assuming they do not, then you have not recieved any service that you did not pay for. Their only claim is that you promised to by another month; however this claim is weak because you could have properly canceled your subscription before buying the next month anyway (and, in most cases, you would still get access until the period you had paid for anyway).

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#284

Post by ipsin »

exclusiv wrote: post #270
ipsin wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just a sign of the appetite for real financial privacy, which is not possible in the U.S. because of money laundering and "know your customer" laws. There's no such thing as a "prepaid, anonymous credit card" that can't be linked to you as a person.

Yes there is. You can buy prepaid cards at grocery stores or malls, although privacy generally erodes when you want to ship.

Are you sure?

I've looked at these, and every single one that I investigated involved some kind of activation process that meant giving up identifying information (or lying, which I'm not willing to do).

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#285

Post by michael_storm »

gizmo686 wrote: post #283
michael_storm wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You didn't "merely consent" to anything; you agreed to their terms and conditions, which state cancellation criteria. There's no "one could argue" here. Commercial law is well-established. Of course they have recourse: taking you to collections. Have you... have you ever not paid a bill before? I'm very confused how one could think this.

If we are talking about something like a phone bill, where you may incur charges during billing period and pay at the end, then you are correct and the company can take you to court because you are in debt to them for services provided that you have not paid for. If we are talking about subscriptions where you pay for a month of service up front, then there is no debt. If they fail in charging another month to the pr…

Again, if you have agreed to their terms and conditions, then you are under obligation to abide by them (within reason; there are limits on what can go into a T&C). The T&C almost certainly obliges you to pay them. Can anyone cite precedent for failure to pay magically releasing someone from that agreement?

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#288

Post by wfunction »

driverdan wrote: post #248
wfunction wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a general question about card numbers. Say there are 3E9 people on Earth, each with 3 cards. That's around 10 digits right there. There's 1 digit for checksum. I imagine you'd want to leave space for least 1000 financial institutions around the world, so that's another 4 digits. Which means you can only have 100 transactions per person. None of this takes into account the fact that the same people are issued wa…

> Say there are 3E9 people on Earth, each with 3 cards. You vastly overestimate the number of people with credit cards.

I wasn't trying to come up with a lower bound, I was trying to make the numbers round off nicely and reasonably to make a point.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#289

Post by stouset »

michael_storm wrote: post #285
gizmo686 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are talking about something like a phone bill, where you may incur charges during billing period and pay at the end, then you are correct and the company can take you to court because you are in debt to them for services provided that you have not paid for. If we are talking about subscriptions where you pay for a month of service up front, then there is no debt. If they fail in charging another month to the pr…

Again, if you have agreed to their terms and conditions, then you are under obligation to abide by them (within reason; there are limits on what can go into a T&C). The T&C almost certainly obliges you to pay them. Can anyone cite precedent for failure to pay magically releasing someone from that agreement?

Gizmo is cleary referring to services where you pay upfront for, e.g., one month of service with some form of auto-renewal. He's not talking about failing to pay for services rendered in advance of payment.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#290

Post by singlow »

adrr wrote: post #249
otterley wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No card issuer is going to verify a transaction of any significant value without AVS. AVS dropped fraud rates on card-not-present transactions dramatically, and it'd skyrocket without it.

AVS doesn't deny anything. Its a status code returned on the auth. Its up to the merchant to reverse the auth if AVS data shows it doesn't match(Exact Address,Zip Code, CVV) or send the auth off for settlement. Merchant has almost no recourse if transaction is marked as fraud and the AVS doesn't match.

It may be up to the merchant, technically, but in reality systems such as Authorize.Net allow you to configure it at the gateway to reject transactions based on various AVS criteria. Many of my clients also only allow shipping to the AVS verified billing address as a way to weed out much of the fraud. For many products, only allowing shipping to the billing address is a reasonable restriction.
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