I’m a happy ApplePay user, but you absolutely do have to give them your (card) information upfront through the whole adding your card in the Wallet app.
That being said, I feel the parent’s viewpoint is naively idealistic, the payment industry is huge with many players and most attempts at new standards or interoperability are by people trying to get a cut of the action, no one is going to adopt a new standard unless they feel they absolutely have to.
ApplePay is pragmatic in that it largely hooks into the existing CC systems and thanks to Apple’s market size they have enough clout to convince people it’s worth the effort.
A whole new standard just for the “general good of the public” will never get any traction without regulation, and in places like the U.S. where bribery is essentially legal (so long as you call
it lobbying), any new regulation like this faces an extreme uphill battle to being introduced except where someone standing to make lots of money is behind it.
> I’m a happy ApplePay user, but you absolutely do have to give them your (card) information upfront through the whole adding your card in the Wallet app.
Do you actually have to give them the card? Or is it only stored somehow on the phone? I wonder how this works exactly.
When I replaced my old iphone with a new one, I did the whole "transfer everything" dance. Waited around for two hours (didn't restore from icloud, but transferred from old to new), and still had to manually add my CCs to Apple Pay again.
My experience is that you can start the process by entering your credit card details, or use your camera to try fill them in for you.
Apple then checks if your card issuer has ApplePay enabled and if so provisions a “virtual” card which is what is stored on the device’s Secure Enclave.
I also just checked my banking app quickly which can initiate the adding of the card to wallet, showing the wallet’s add card screen with the card holder name and the last 4 digits and asking if you want to proceed.
There is no way to see what the full virtual card number is, so there is no way to use this virtual card aside from tapping your phone on CC machines or using websites which have set up ApplePay as a payment method.
CC machines don’t actually have to support ApplePay specifically, as long as it supports tap to pay without insisting on a PIN, then ApplePay works with it. In essence your phone’s NFC exactly implements the same capabilities and protocols as NFC chips on normal credit cards.
Seems like parsing semantics. "Pre-given them" - are you giving it directly to apple.com? No. You're putting in your hardware, true. And... somehow... it makes it to all your other apple devices.
Apple Pay is one of the (few) things where that is not the case. New phone = manually re-adding cards to Apple Pay. Get an Apple Watch? It does not get your Apple Pay info until you manually add them to the watch.
I have access to card data in macOS safari that I entered on my iPhone. I don't double enter it. I do know if you disable security on the phone, you lose the card info and have to readd.
It's just a credit card though? Seems like a weird distinction when those details are intended to be given out. I presume if you're using one-time cards you're not using Apple pay at all. Plus you need the CVC code and such to re-auth them on new devices.
Apple has issues with privacy, but I don't really see how this is one of them.