“The movement to boycott merchants who are members of the MCX consortium also seems to be growing in popularity, gaining a Boycott MCX website with a full list of members,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac. “When you click on the name of a consortium member, a list of competing stores who accept or plan to accept Apple Pay is displayed.”
“Having been criticized for its clunky use of QR codes, MCX said yesterday that CurrentC may ‘pivot to NFC over time,'” Lovejoy reports. “The company had earlier said that it was ‘entirely possible’ that it would do a U-turn on its current exclusivity requirement and allow merchants to accept both CurrentC and Apple Pay at some point in the future, though no certainty or timeframe was offered.”
“The company fixed the broken link to its privacy policy, in which it describes the ways in which it shares information collected about consumers using the CurrentC payment system. This confirms that MCX shares information with merchants, as well as with a range of third-parties,” Lovejoy reports. “Apple Pay, in contrast, does not even share your card details with merchants.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That’s right, it’s not just about eliminating credit card fees: It’s about tracking customers. CurrentC will track users’ purchases — or, it would, if anybody actually uses it, which they won’t because it’s a cumbersome clusterfsck of overly-intrusive bank account access and arduous QR-code scanning laboriousness — and that, tracking users’ purchases, cuts to the issue of what MCX CurrentC merchants really want besides more money: they wants to know what their customers buy and when they buy it, so that they can hit them with targeted ads on their phones.
Apple doesn’t save your transaction information. With Apple Pay, your payments are private. Apple Pay doesn’t store the details of your transactions so they can’t be tied back to you. That is what Walmart, CVS, Rite-Aid et al. hate about Apple Pay and why they currently won’t accept it.
Boycott non-cash payment systems from any company that willfully turns off NFC in an effort to block the vastly more secure, much more private, and far easier-to-use Apple Pay service.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
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