81–90 of 100 posts
Does anyone understand why cash is so common in Germany (or why cards are so rarely accepted)? I didn't expect it from a modern first world European country.
Germans are sort of reticent or skeptical about a lot of modern consumer technology, I've found.
Looking at what China is doing is gonna give them more ammunition. I used to love digital payment but I'm getting increasingly wary of it. Look what big private companies did with our data, what will happen when they have all your purchase history and when your daily life depends on them approving your transactions? It's too much power. Look at the many horror stories of people getting their money locked out in Paypa…
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Germans are sort of reticent or skeptical about a lot of modern consumer technology, I've found.
Maybe they are just more aware of the associated risks?
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This is untrue. For tourists and Visa/MasterCard paying with a card is usually cheaper than withdrawing foreign cash at ATM. With ATM you are slapped with a foreign withdrawal fee and you usually get worse exchange rate.
Depends on your credit card: it's not uncommon for them to also slap you with foreign transaction fees of 3% or higher. In general, the hierarchy of fees is no-fee CC < regular CC < ATM withdrawal < exchange cash at destination < exchange cash somewhere else.
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Thankfully Sweden got GDPR, which protects from collecting data "just because you can".
> Thankfully Sweden got GDPR, which protects from collecting data "just because you can". Not really. https://blog.instantor.com/ultimate-guide-gdpr-impacts-on-cr...
B. This source also states that the GDPR prevents data harvesting without consent, which it mentions continuously throughout this article.
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It's been a while since I lived in Sweden, but does Swish not tie to a credit card? If so, it would be no more able to process payments than credit cards, as the payment processor is still involved. It will only work if it uses direct bank transfers, in which case an outage at your bank or in clearing houses (which is no less likely than an outage at a large payment provider) would take out both debit cards, Swish, a…
Swish is cleared by the Bankgirot system. I'm not completely sure about the technical details but there is no card involved.
The interesting component to this is what happens when the payment system $hits the bed. 3 weeks ago last friday and saturday in sydney the communications system underlying about 50% of all financial transactions (taxi card readers, many ATMs, many businesses) collapsed with the result that if you didn't have cash you couldn't make an exchange. How robust do people really think these systems are? I certainly have no…
I think the systems are pretty robust by any measure. I've never had a card reader in the Netherlands fail and had to pay with cash before. I have seen ATM's out of order a couple of times though. If the payment networks all go down, I imagine you'd also have trouble withdrawing cash from an ATM too. What's the alternative? Cash under your mattress for a rainy day? Do you think the value of cash would be stable enoug…
This is extra amusing because there was a major outage this year in the card payment infrastructure of the Netherlands. It's possible you missed it, but only if you didn't try to pay anywhere.
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Anyone not selling your data is just sitting on money-making opportunities for no reason. It would be insane. First thing that popped up: https://www.businessinsider.com/credit-cards-sell-purchase-d... So, we know they sell anonymized data. We don't know if its easily de-anonymizable because that takes some studying, and we don't know what else they are selling they don't tell you about.
Right, but is it known they sell the data in the EU?
Cash = anonymity as credit card companies sell your data to Facebook and anyone else...
But not in Europe, where the privacy protection laws forbids doing this without client's consent.