
IPhone Users Are About to Be Screwed Over - jaybol
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376702,00.asp?obref=obinsite
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jdminhbg
This is almost entirely incoherent paranoia based on the idea that a) the
iPhone will route payments through AT&T and b) phone companies used 900-number
reconnection scams in the 90s to prove to banks that they should be in charge
of payment processing.

Even if you somehow manage to follow the logic behind (b), the idea that
Apple's going to just throw away its pre-installed and -activated iTunes
account on every iOS device and just give everything to AT&T is completely
insane.

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alexqgb
Just consider the source.

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tzs
Wait...NFC payments involve the phone company?

I had assumed it would work like contactless credit cards, which obviously do
not have a phone connection. That is, the phone would simply be used to store
your credit card information, and use NFC to transmit it to the terminal when
you want to pay.

The stories I've seen on this say it is coming to both iPhone and iPad 2,
which would seem to confirm that the phone company is not involved since iPad
2 is not a phone.

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bluekeybox
Why would someone link to anything written by John Dvorak who made a
profession out of trolling Apple?

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gfodor
The irony is this article is completely wrong in its analysis but completely
correct in its conclusion. Once tons of money is flowing through iTunes for
consumer goods, eventually there will be a "Apple tax" on all consumer goods
where the majority of payments are happening from iPhones (hello Starbucks!),
to offset the fees Apple is going to charge for using their payments system.

This fee of course is going to be the fee the credit card companies charge,
_plus_ the Apple-related chunk, so that's why it's going to inflate prices
more than the already inflated prices you see due to the luxury of being able
to use a credit card.

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wglb
Quite bluntly, I don't think Dvorak is really HN-worthy, and this article does
not change my opinion.

So instead of commenting on this sort of thing and upvoting it, let's do
something to improve HN.

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mgkimsal
There's nothing here that's specific to the iPhone - NFC and phone companies
handling payments - yeah, there's potential downsides. But it's not iPhone
specific.

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octopus
Well, today you could be screwed on any device that can be used to make
payments. This does not mean people will stop using a computer (or a
smartphone) to pay for stuff. You can't stop technical progress by being
paranoid.

Eventually all users will learn to protect themselves by limiting in some way
the amount of money your smartphone can access per day or for a given
transaction.

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EarthLaunch
>I consider this technology to be the most onerous ever.

I stopped reading here.

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kbob
Serious question. Is John Dvorak a humor writer or just befuddled? I've read
his column occasionally for many years, but I've never been able to decide.

