They’re not secure—maybe not as insecure as checks, but not by much. Not because the data is written on the plastic, and can be lost (although, th

Apple Pay as a Digital Check - by Alvaro Duran

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2024-11-06 09:30:02

They’re not secure—maybe not as insecure as checks, but not by much. Not because the data is written on the plastic, and can be lost (although, that too).

No. My issue with credit cards is that the whole protocol is a mess, designed in an era where being online was science fiction.

There are two features that make the credit card protocol insecure. One is that the details written in your card are reusable. When you fill a checkout form, you always key in the same information every time. The other is that to prove that you are who you claim to be, you need to share precisely the information that should be kept secret.

This creates a challenge: despite the combined efforts of everyone working in payments, if someone wants to steal your card data, they just have to ask you in a way that seems convincing. Trained by habit, we often fall for it.

I’m Alvaro Duran, and this is The Payments Engineer Playbook. It is frustrating to see diagrams on LinkedIn about payment systems that are simplistic, or even wrong. The ugly truth is that there’s not much out there that teaches you how to build money software for real users and real money.