“The mobile payments company Square is planning to accept Apple Pay,” Alanna Petroff reports for CNNMoney. “Square founder Jack Dorsey — who also famously launched Twitter — told CNN that he wants to help businesses accept all forms of payments, and Apple Pay is no exception.”
“Apple Pay and Square have generally been viewed as competitors in the mobile payment space, but Dorsey doesn’t see it that way,” Petroff reports. “‘We’re not building a credit card. We’re not building a payment device. We’re building a [cash] register, and this register accepts all these forms of payments,’ Dorsey told CNN in an interview.”
Petroff reports, “Square plans to begin accepting Apple Pay sometime in 2015.”
Read more in the full article here.
All forms of payments except payments having to do with firearms. I won’t use Square…at all…ever.
It is refreshing to see integrity, honor and commitment still prevails and even more so when we find people with character and spine sufficient to demonstrate such. TY and Happy Thanksgiving, Sir
No idea what either of you said, but I like Lee’s attitude.
I didn’t understand it either, at first.
Apparently Square’s user agreement prohibits using their system for firearms or ammunition. Actually, it prohibits a lot of stuff:
“By creating a Square Account, you also confirm that you will not accept payments in connection with the following businesses or business activities: (1) any illegal activity or goods, (2) buyers or membership clubs, including dues associated with such clubs, (3) credit counseling or credit repair agencies, (4) credit protection or identity theft protection services, (5) direct marketing or subscription offers or services, (6) infomercial sales, (7) internet/mail order/telephone order pharmacies or pharmacy referral services (where fulfillment of medication is performed with an internet or telephone consultation, absent a physical visit with a physician including re-importation of pharmaceuticals from foreign countries), (8) unauthorized multi-level marketing businesses, (9) inbound or outbound telemarketers, (10) prepaid phone cards or phone services, (11) rebate based businesses, (12) up-sell merchants, (13) bill payment services, (14) betting, including lottery tickets, casino gaming chips, off-track betting, and wagers at races, (15) manual or automated cash disbursements, (16) prepaid cards, checks, or other financial merchandise or services, (17) sales of money-orders or foreign currency, (18) wire transfer money orders, (19) high-risk products and services, including telemarketing sales, (20) automated fuel dispensers, (21) adult entertainment oriented products or services (in any medium, including internet, telephone, or printed material), (22) sales of (i) firearms, firearm parts or hardware, and ammunition; or (ii) weapons and other devices designed to cause physical injury (23) internet/mail order/telephone order cigarette or tobacco sales, (24) drug paraphernalia, (25) occult materials, (26) hate or harmful products, (27) escort services, or (28) bankruptcy attorneys or collection agencies engaged in the collection of debt.”
Occult materials?
Well that does it! If I can’t buy that goat to sacrifice with Square, then I’m not using it either!
Damn I wanted that nuclear missile that I have had my eye on.
A lot of credit card processing companies have very similar language, even though they don’t actually enforce any of this… unless there’s a problem with the merchant. I don’t know if this is the case with Square, but it could be a way of limited liability instead of any actual moral objection.
That’s how it reads to me, too – they just want to be able to say “we told them not to do that” if anyone tries to include them in some kind of lawsuit. Say, for example, people suing a gun manufacturer, the gun-seller, and the payment-processesor over the latest massacre we get so regularly here in the good ole US of A. 🙁
Firearms are a perfectly legitimate commodity. There is nothing criminal about buying a forearm or ammunition. The Obama administration has been leaning on banks and other transaction processors to reject sales having to do with firearms. They can’t get anti-gun legislation through congress, so they have been threatening banks and other financial institutions with increased scrutiny. It’s intimidation, pure and simple. I will not do business with people who knuckle under to those tactics, or agree with those principles. Got it now?
firearm, not forearm. Fscking spell check!
“The Justice Department’s ‘Operation Choke Point’ initiative has been shrouded in secrecy, but now it is starting to come to light. I first heard about the program in January through this article and since then it has been difficult to discover details about it. It is so named because through strangling the providers of financial services to the targeted industries, the government can ‘choke off’ the oxygen (money) needed for these industries to survive. Without an ability to process payments, the businesses – especially online vendors — cannot survive.
The general outline is the DOJ and bank regulators are putting the screws to banks and other third-party payment processors to refuse banking services to companies and industries that are deemed to pose a ‘reputation risk’ to the bank. Most controversially, the list of dubious industries is populated by enterprises that are entirely, or at least generally, legal. Tom Blumer’s extremely informative post summarizing what is known to date about Operation Choke Point reproduces the list, which includes things such as ammunition sales, escort services, get-quick-rich schemes, on-line gambling, “racist materials” and payday loans. Quite obviously, some of these things are not like the other; moreover, just because there are some bad apples within a legal industry doesn’t justify effectively destroying a legal industry through secret executive fiat.
Especially ironic, of course, is that while the DOJ and bank regulators are choking off financial services to legal industries, they are also encouraging banks to provide banking services to illegal marijuana sales.
The ability to destroy legal industries through secret actions to deprive them of banking services has obvious political consequences. For example, it was reported last week that firearms shops are alleging that Operation Choke Point is being used to pressure banks into refusing to providing financial services. There are also reports that porn stars (and here) have had their bank accounts terminated for “moral” reasons related to the “reputation risk” of banking individuals in the porn industry. IRS officials must already be salivating about ways to apply Operation Choke Point to tea party groups.
In principle, of course, the logic of Operation Choke Point could be extended to groups not currently targeted. Notably absent from the FDIC’s hit list, for example, are abortion clinics, radical environmental groups, or, well, marijuana shops, for that matter. Something similar was done to cut off credit-card payments to support the operation of WikiLeaks.
The larger legal and regulatory issue here is the expansive use of the vague and subjective standard of ‘reputation risk’ to target these industries. In a letter to Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve, last week, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling expressed concern over the growing use of ‘reputation risk’ as a vehicle for attacking legal businesses. Is there any discernible principle as to why, for example, a payday lender or firearms dealer poses a ‘reputation risk’ and an abortion provider does not?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/24/operation-choke-point/
I actually mostly agree with you – secret laws and secret attacks on otherwise legal behavior are not the answer. We need actual sensible massacre-prevention legislation, which is supported by a large majority of Americans, as well as a sizable group within the NRA. If only our politicians weren’t so obedient to the extremist NRA leaders and actually did the will of the people.
Approximately 100,000,000 law abiding gun owners didn’t kill anyone yesterday. Are we willing to take away the civil rights of 100,000,000 decent, law abiding Americans in order to feel like we’ve done something about the handful of psychotic individuals who have committed mass murders of the last few years? Do we outlaw alcohol because of the hundreds of fatal auto accidents each month caused by drunk drivers? Do we require sobriety detectors on each and every vehicle? When it comes to gang violence involving firearms, can’t we simply try to enforce the laws that already apply? It was 50 years ago that we dismantled our secure inpatient mental health care systems and turned those patients into the streets, to be taken care of by their families at best, and to sleep in the gutters at worst. These are the the “shooters” of today. Ask yourself why this kind of crime was so rare 60 or 70 years ago, when there was even less control over firearms. Are we going to try to make the whole world into a padded cell void of dangerous objects so that we can continue to let crazy people roam the streets? Every shooter in the last 10 years has had people close to them who were worried about them harming themselves or others. In light of that fact, our present efforts around controlling guns and prohibiting their possession seems a bit misguided, don’t you think?
Wow, and I thought PayPal were a88holes.
I guess they both are.
Waiting for the next eWalet service to not invade my life.
Idiot
In other words, you have nothing intelligent to say.
I have no problem with Square choosing to not enable the sale of firearms and ammo- it is actually a good reason to support them. E-payment could be used to break existing gun laws.
No, it can’t. There’s nothing about electronic payments that is any more enabling of law breaking than any other payment form. What is inherently immoral or illegal about buying and selling firearms and ammunition? You appear to be assuming that there are no legal and ethical uses for those items.
background checks.
It is already illegal for a business without a federal firearms dealers license to sell guns at all, with or without a background check. It is illegal everywhere for even licensed gun dealers to sell guns without a background check. Guns sold on the internet must be shipped to a licensed dealer, where a background check is run on the new owner before delivery. A background check is required in nearly every state for a gun transfer at a gun show. The only sale that can legally be made anywhere in America without a background check is a face-to-face sale between two residents of the same state, and then only in some states. How much more do you want?
Registration of all firearms, property taxation of firearms, higher ammunition taxes, full background checks and liability insurance for every gun owner for every firearm.
That and making gun owners liable for their misuse. I won’t ask that you join the National Guard (Militia) like the Amendment says.
Registration, time after time, leads to confiscation. Guns are right now being confiscated in New York, where they are registered by law.
USSC Chief Justice Marshall said: “That the power of taxing [a thing] by the States may be exercised so as to destroy it, is too obvious to be denied, and that the power to tax involves the power to destroy [is] not to be denied.” You cannot legally tax a civil right. Paying a fee to exercise a civil right is illegal (e.g. poll taxes).
Higher ammunition taxes: See above statement.
Whatever you mean by full background checks, those are already being done in 98% of legal purchases. They are being done in 0% of illegal purchases. You want to burden people who don’t break the law in order to punish those who do break the law, so you pass a new law which the lawful will obey and be burdened, while the unlawful will continue to ignore your efforts. What are your true motives? They apparently have nothing to do with lawlessness or illegal acts. It would seem you have something else in mind. What would that be?
Mandatory liability insurance for gun owners? As interpreted by the USSC in the case of Obamacare, such an insurance requirement amounts to a tax, otherwise Congress would have no authority to impose the requirement. And if it’s a tax then see Chief Justice Marshall’s statement above.
Making gun owners liable for their misuse? The militia? Clearly you do not understand the Constitution. Please do little more reading about the language of the 2nd Amendment and its meaning (See Justice Scalia’s decision in the Heller case, the federalist papers, etc.) There is a long history over several centuries in American and English jurisprudence that holds to the idea that one cannot be required to foresee the illegal actions of another. I am not required to foresee the theft of my firearms or any other illegal act by another in order to avoid liability for subsequent acts or occurrences.
You know, when you put a personal prejudice front and center, and then try to justify it with practical arguments, it seldom makes sense. Why not just admit that you’re afraid of guns and the people who own them, and you want to illegally force those people to behave as you’d like them to? Registration, taxation, background checks, financial and criminal liability, and any other remedies you bring forward are not aimed at taking reasonable measures to make our society safer. They are aimed solely to outlaw and eliminate guns from our society completely, and ironically, you would do so at the point of a gun.
You say a civil right cannot be taxed, but many communities require a fee for a permit to assemble public to protest or hold a rally. That effectively is taxing a civil right.
Firearms are not some special right and the right is limited. Just as speed is limited to common sense (theater example), so should the ownership and possession of firearms. I do not oppose citizens owning firearms, but think they should be taxed, registered, regulated, insured and the owners held legally accountable for their misuse. I have to have 2 fences between the public space and my swimming pool, so why should someone’s firearm be completely unregulated?
You don’t have a Constitutional right to a swimming pool, nor to drive at all at any speed on public roads. Requiring a permit to assemble and charging a fee for it is clearly unconstitutional, but various levels of governments get away with many things like this that are never challenged.
You clearly don’t have a realistic concept of what qualifies as a constitutional issue, nor the differences between such issues and other issues.
Maybe you should have to join the militia to own a firearm.
Take a look at the Second Amendment:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
According to the USSC, the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one ‘prefatory’ and the other ‘operative.’ On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing; the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about ‘the right of the people … shall not be infringed’.
“The Amendment’s prefatory clause announced a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority.
Well good. I want everyplace that sells anything (almost) to take Apple Pay.
How hard would it be for Apple to build it’s own cash register app for the new iPhones? I would love to have this option for my customers.
Apple builds their own portable “registers” for use in their Apple Stores … not sure if they market them to other stores or not. The portables in the Apple Stores have been upgraded to accept Apple Pay.
I’ve also been wondering if all those iPad registers I see could be easily converted to use Apple Pay as well … maybe some kind of NFC add on, or use iBeacon?
I don’t see how they might have been viewed as competitors.
Square makes POS terminals, the things a merchant needs to have in order to accept a credit card, not payment cards. They seem to fit together like hand-in-glove.
They probably never made a NFC reader before because there wasn’t a market for them until Apple Pay.
Technically, Square is a provider of a merchant account -type of service, which enables a business (or a person) to accept credit cards as payment method. As a part of their service, they provide a free device that attaches to your mobile phone or iPad, which, together with their free software, turns your mobile device into a portable Point-of-Sale terminal. Square loses money on the physical dongle and the client software (they give them away for free to anyone who signs up). Their primary source of revenue is transaction fees they charge when you receive a credit card payments using their service.