I hope what you take away from this post is that while Apple Pay is a great way to pay for things and that Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry. DPANs are great for making it harder to track one person’s purchases across multiple merchants and they make customers less at risk in the event of a data breach of payment card info.
↫ Matt Birchler
The gist of the article is that all the things Apple claims are unique about Apple Pay are really not unique at all, and quite a few things Apple touts are just flat-out lies, such as merchants being unable to know what you buy or people being unable to track you when you use Apple Pay. Other digital wallets, from Google, Samsung, and others, work in the exact same way Apple Pay does, and even banks and similar companies implement their payment systems the way Apple Pay does.
It’s a case study in how Apple’s marketing and PR bloggers manage to perpetuate a myth solely because so many people just assume it must be true. Apple wouldn’t lie, right?
This is also a case study on how bad Google is. Most people in the US on Android use things like PayPal and CashApp mainly because Google had changed Google Wallet and Google pay about 5 times. (They have changed it again recently)
A lot of times once Apple pushes something they are consistent and any changes come slowly and constantly. For us tech people it’s “lack of innovation “ for the regular user it is familiarity. No surprises.
The problem with all these solutions is that they all try to be middle men. This means more fees, more private data getting leaked. IMHO they shouldn’t exist at all.
Honestly I wish we had secure federated network would be supported by all banks directly without the need for any more scummy 3rd parties. Banks should transfer money directly between accounts and it should be nobody else’s bloody business. The trillions we could save and frankly it would be more secure. It’s not a technological problem, it’s an incumbency problem.
I should have proof read better.