Why are 'big' banks promoting Apple-Pay?

[tzijlstra]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203027

 

Or not

 

 

 

If you think about how it works, the phone is acting like a card (for simplicities sake), when you use a card to pay for something, the card doesn't find out what you've bought or where you are paying. It just interacts with the POS in a defined way. The phone works in the same way. It gets no information about what you are buying, the only information it really gets is the amount requested, and apple say that this is not stored and/or transmitted anywhere.

 

That is a good find Cyclone. However, there are some remaining loopholes. The trick is in the "Tied back to you" and "transaction information". Without going too much in to information management techno-babble, Apple does not have to link "it" to you, just to your representation in their system (which no doubt is completely encrypted and anonymised so no human being can gain meaningful access to the data). Transaction information is equally ambiguous

 

They can then use the data from your representation in the system, match it with the representation of shops in the system and combine the two to create an abstracted profile of the things you like spending money on or indeed the type of customer that attends certain shops.

 

In fact they pretty openly admit this is what they do in the following statement:

 

Using Apple Pay in stores

 

Apple Pay was designed so that when you pay in stores, Apple doesn’t collect any transaction information that can be tied back to you. If you have Location Services turned on, the location of your device and the approximate date and time of the transaction may be sent anonymously to Apple. Apple uses this information to help Apple Pay improve the accuracy of business names in your transaction history and may be retained in the aggregate to improve Apple Pay and other Apple products and services.

When you use rewards passes with Apple Pay, Apple doesn’t receive any information about the rewards transaction other than what's displayed on the pass.