Someone should tell Square that in Canada we use smart chips...I don't remember the last time I swipe a card....Cool product with prehistoric technology...
The rest of this thread is worth a read. To summarize: very soon chipped cards that are swiped instead of chip-and-pinned will be far more likely to trip the fraud alarm.
You are right but you and I know the Square brand so I won't have a problem to use it but here in canada any time Banks give you a brand new card with smart chips , they tell you to stop using the swipe system because it's not as safe as the smart chips... Guess what!? my mom stops and refuses to use a swipe system of any kind....
Because the PIN is not meant to be shared, it is a lot easier for banks to deny all responsibility for any card fraud when using chip-and-pin in court, which is why they are so gung-ho in convincing people to use them.
I'm surprised they even released a hardware swipe solution at all. Most canadian cards have NFC embedded in them now (Interac Flash, MasterCard PayPass, Visa payWave). Surely a much simpler solution is just being able to tap my card to a merchant's phone and avoid a special dongle all together?
I think we can assume that Square will transition to chip readers eventually. In the meantime, the swipe works on Canadian cards so it's not really an issue.