Technology
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Tap to pay isn't there to stop you from interacting with the terminal though? I mean yeah it was handy during the pandemic to now have to touch things many other people touch but that wasn't the main idea behind tap to pay.
Yep, my apologies I should've been a bit more clear - a lot of stores during the pandemic put up signs saying that they preferred for you to use tap-to-pay as a preventative / safety measure, and this store is one of them.
Of course, even during the peak point of the pandemic that prompt was still there, and is still there... and due to the medication that I'm on I am somewhat immunocompromised so I would prefer to not have to touch the screen since everyone who pays using anything that isn't cash has to also touch the display.
Ah then yeah that kinda silly. They should at least have a cashier override for that prompt if they are going to brag about not having to touch it.
Tap to pay is there for banks to eliminate the last money transaction they weren't taking a cut of: cash payments.
They haven't been trying to get this shit going for almost 2 decades because the convenience othe their customers is their driving motivation...
I mean I hardly use the tap to pay feature on my cards but I use credit cards for everything. Tap to pay is more secure so protects the banks more. Same reason we moved to chips instead of always using mag strips.
I've actually worked in smartcard issuance at some point and tap to pay isn't at all more secure than the cards with smartchips requiring physical contact and a pin code that the banks had finally gotten around to adopt after more than a decade of Visa and Mastercard trying to force them to ditch magstrip (which was laughably insecure).
Tap to pay actuall reduced security because it removed the "locked for anything with a key known only to the user" element and replaced it with a limit on losses (i.e. pinless payments are limited to a certain amount so losses if the card is stolen are limited) and replaced the physical connection requirement with a radio-range one which can be worked around with a directional antenna (something as simple as a pringles can).
Sure, it's better than magstrip, but then pretty much anything is better than magstrip.