Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Send money with Gmail

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 257 posts

Re: Send money with Gmail

#91

Post by supergauntlet »

rogerbinns wrote: post #83
gesman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'd be Google - I'd force senders to have 2-step authentication configured before sending money.

Google's 2 step authentication is completely useless to some of us because they don't have actual per application passwords. For example if you use an IMAP client to read gmail, then you can get an "application specific" password for it. But Google then allow that password to be used for anything. Essentially you've used 2 step authentication in order to setup 1 step authentication.

Yes, but they must first guess that password (which is ostensibly longer and more random than the typical passwords people choose.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#92

Post by catch23 »

jrockway wrote: post #68
michaelt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I use this to pay for something I've purchased online, and I later realize the seller is a scammer and want to issue a chargeback. Will that be possible? What are your plans for this situation? If something goes wrong with my account, can my account be locked and my balance frozen? Will it be possible to contact a real human who knows what they're doing to get that fixed?

Yes, you can talk to a real human. Please call us any time you think you're having a problem, the number is 1-855-492-5538. For details about what we can and can't help with, take a look at this article: http://support.google.com/wallet/bin/static.py?hl=en&pag...

Nice. Can you send me $1 so I can be accelerated into the beta? :-)

Re: Send money with Gmail

#93

Post by ShawnBird »

vectorpush wrote: post #73
toomuchtodo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Paypal is known as a bastion of neutral dispute resolution rolls eyes

Paypal is terrible, but at least you can get on the phone and talk to someone when things get hairy. Every time I have google support issues I end up waiting days or weeks for automatic replies that don't even address the issue.

Google Apps has great support.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#94

Post by danso »

tsycho wrote: post #85
rdl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks awesome, but not at all core to Google's core revenue generators (gmail isn't, either, and this is on top of gmail...). Not to be a dick, but how do we know we can trust adopting this? For user to user payments it's not a big deal to switch to/from this, but for anything else, ... Also, how will Google handle the customer support needs of payments? People get really pissy when their accounts are frozen, tr…

Why do you think that Gmail is not a core product for Google just because it's not the primary revenue generator? Gmail is a very important user identifier, is probably quite critical for personalized ads, has high usage numbers, and most likely* is revenue positive via ads within Gmail. Quite unlike all the shut down projects, won't you say? *I have no idea, I'm just guessing.

Yeah, you could consider GMail a loss-leader if you'd like. People rely on the email as an essential life service...and -- how nice -- there's some easy-to-use paid features integrated into it.

Just like how gas stations make more money from a cup of coffee than 10 gallons of unleaded.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#95

Post by dangrossman »

cookiecaper wrote: post #32
marknutter wrote: post #23

What's not clear is how a person without a google wallet account claims the money. Is it the same tedious process of having to verify a bank account, give a social security number, promise a first born child, etc.

It should be noted that much of this process is federally mandated across a multitude of regulations. Since 9/11, it has been illegal to open bank accounts without a valid SSN, so that the government can track money more easily. AFAIK, IANAL, IIRC, etc etc etc etc

"Know Your Customer" does not mandate what specific pieces of identification a bank has to ask for, only that a bank have "reasonable procedures to verify the identity of any person seeking to open an account". There are many that still don't require an SSN.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#96

Post by wilfra »

Very interesting how they structured the fees. Instead of how PayPal, Square, Stripe and just about everybody else in the World does it, where it is free to send money but merchants must pay a fee to receive it - they are making it always free for merchants and free for users who pay from a bank account or G Wallet balance - and users who want to pay by debit or CC have to pay a fee.

I'm not sure how the market will react to that but it's clearly deliberate and could turn into a great way to drive adoption, as merchants will clearly prefer to use G Wallet with no fees and will push their users toward that whenever possible.

(I realize this is being marketed as P2P but if they intend to take down PayPal et al, it will surely evolve into a way to pay merchants for things).

Re: Send money with Gmail

#98

Post by jonknee »

rogerbinns wrote: post #83
gesman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'd be Google - I'd force senders to have 2-step authentication configured before sending money.

Google's 2 step authentication is completely useless to some of us because they don't have actual per application passwords. For example if you use an IMAP client to read gmail, then you can get an "application specific" password for it. But Google then allow that password to be used for anything. Essentially you've used 2 step authentication in order to setup 1 step authentication.

Considering Google's accounts aren't segmented by activity (there would be hundreds of activities with many added and removed all the time) that sounds like it would be a nightmare.

Google's app specific passwords are revokable which is the important part. They also can't access sensitive account operations which means you can't reset the master password if you just have an ASP.

If you lose control of your email password you can revoke it and generate a new one. The passwords are long and secure,

Re: Send money with Gmail

#99

Post by peterarmstrong »

raldi wrote: post #71
adsenseclient wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paypal is actually much better. When you reach about 10k/mo, they give you a special representative from the account management team, with a special phone number, and those guys are quite smart and easily available. First hand knowledge.

I used to manage a Paypal account that did significantly more than that, and nobody ever offered that to me.

Internationally I think it's $50k/mo in revenue...

Re: Send money with Gmail

#100

Post by VLM »

dragonwriter wrote: post #51
droopyEyelids wrote: post #29

In case there was any ambiguity about whether Google knew the 'real you' from their logging of IPs and search terms, this should remove all of it. In a way I think we're seeing Google striking against Facebook in what I call the "identity wars" where each service is struggling to be an identity and information service about people.

> In case there was any ambiguity about whether Google knew the 'real you' from their logging of IPs and search terms, this should remove all of it. How? I mean, obviously, if you use this service (either as a sender or receiver) Google will know more about your real identity as part of conducting the transaction, but how does this say anything about what Google knows "from their logging of IPs and search terms"?

The part I can't figure out is I did "verify my identity" using my legal name, addrs, last4ssn and bday. And it responded back in about 1 second "verified". So how does that work? (Other than perhaps they already have a detailed file on me LOL)
Post reply on HN