Will I fuck!!
My card / bank account / money ONLY EXIST for me to use to pay for the stuff I want, the things i want to do and to do so conveniently. It serves no other purpose.
I refuse to live my life in fear that someone might steal my precious money or details, and I refuse to give up the convenience that using a card entails, just because there is a slim chance that someone could perhaps get hold of my details.
Oh noes!
Don't you be looking at my Pin now y'hear, no seriously, look away awkwardly please.
Everytime you use an ATM machine there is a chance it's been hacked to clone your card (has happened twice to family members) everytime you use your card online there is a chance the details could go astray (I used to write cc details onto paper orders with thick black pen at a fairly large online retailer, sometimes those paper orders went missing, it happens.). Should we all go back to using only cash?
The other thing (I don't know how it works in the USA) but UK banks tend to cover you for that shit. If you notice something you didn't authorise coming out of your account, they lend you interest free money to cover the loss right away and then reclaim it from their insurance or whatnot. Either way, it all comes back, and you're not even left out of pocket in the meantime!
Banks also have added protection such as the verified by Visa system, which pushes any fear back further into the depths of my mind.
We could embrace and accept this modern age of convenient payments, stored details and possible data theft, or we could all hide behind the fear that someone might get our monies and have to go to a store, to pick up a card to type in the code, to buy what is, essentially an instant purchase and download product. It just defeats the whole prupose.
I think that using pre-paid cards because of fear destroys the whole convenience and the whole buying ethos of not only online services like the PSN, but of credit/debit cards in general!
Personally it wouldn't make a shit of a difference anyway, as a whole lot of companies / services have my details on file for instant payments, and I like it that way...
PSN
XBL
Steam
Paypal
Dominos Pizza
Amazon
Just-eat
Hungry House
Littlewoods
Virgin Media
.......to name but a few.
If you are so scared that you will turn a one click purchase into a trip out to buy a card and all the extra bullshit that that entails, well, if that's the case, I truely feel sorry for you.
Personally the moment the PSN store comes back online I will re-enter all of my payment details, I will ensure my automatic payment for PSN+ is still set up and I will sit back and enjoy knowing I can spend my own money on the things I want at the click of a button free of the fear that seems to dictate to so many how they live their lives.
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I agree with the both of you, although to be honest it's not the fear of the theft that scares people so much as the fear that they are either financially unstable without credit cards, or even with them. I mean it really belies the general ineptitude of people in that they love money so much that they are afraid of what would become of them without it.
Money doesn't make ham sandwiches.
Imma keep payin' thanks...But maybe not with the PSN. Not until everything is back up and they don't get hacked again in 3 weeks =P.
They kept everyone in the dark about card information leaks for almost a week. They then played up and down the extent of the damage that the hackers had caused. The story was changing daily and a pretty shitty situation to begin with got FUBAR.
I agree with you that online transactions is not something to tiptoe round but Sony really need to sort out their PR. This widespread panic is partly caused by their mismanagement of the situation.
And every time a company asks me for my credit card (my real one, not a prepaid) I ask myself if the convenience of using my credit card is worth the possibility of dealing with the worst case scenario of spending time and money getting fraudulent charges reversed and the damage done to my credit score in the interim.
It probably makes me paranoid, but it's a lot easier to pick up a prepaid card at the grocery store while I'm there buying cheese, slices of ham, and bread to make my sandwich than it is to phone in and deal with charges on my Visa or Mastercard that I absolutely can't explain. It doesn't really cost much and I get more piece of mind.
I'll save feeling sorry for the you when a worst case scenario does happen to you, SC.
They're called cashpoints over here, god knows why I used ATM, we literally never call them that.
I kinda thought it stood for "Mouth" though. AmIright?
... ironically I'm more scared of the institution. I once had an insurance company do the whole "automatic renewal" thing on my renters insurance... on a place I no longer even lived in. It was a nightmare getting it reversed. I have no problem with Sony, but I'm reluctant to use my credit card to purchase a gold membership on Xbox because I've so often heard complaints that it was automatically renewed. Until I'm more comfortable with the system (and how to ensure that doesn't happen) I'll use pre-paid cards.
Its the fact that Sony do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to protect the information of their customers in the first place and the LACK OF RESPONSIBILTY shown by Sony in informing their customers promptly that their information had been leaked.
Those two things they neglected to do are the basics of the basics in business. You update your security software, you inform the consumer INSTANTLY if there's a breack. Sony deserved all the shit they got over this.
My CC info was a non-issue, I had cancelled anyway due to losing the card somewhere that same day before PSN went down.
That said, I won't do business with Sony for the remainder of this year on principle until they have shown that their network security is more than just talking out of their ass.
Sony needs to be tough love but the real tragedy here is there are more than enough people that will just continue to bend over and take it.
For convenience, of course.
While that's some totally sweet impotent rage you're sporting, you might want to try again.
I have been using my CC for everything since I was 19 and I work at a Credit Union and, sadly, this stuff happens ALL the time, I don't worry about loosing it or someone stealing it because if someone wants it, they will get it. Just like locking your door...safety blanket becuase if someone wants in your house a locked door will do NOTHING to stop them from getting in, it's all about making the consumer feel safe, 100% illusion.
@The Silent Protagonist
People get hacked all the time, the company that STORES information for Visa/MasterCard got hacked a couple years ago and 1.5 million cards were compromised. Now that is less than Sony as they don't know how many, but the company that got hacked had one job and one job only....to protect the data and they failed.
So if your bank got broken into and robbed/hacked, will you be pulling all your money to a new bank or stop using that bank for a year? If you left your wallet at a friends place and his house gets broken into, will you stop going to that friends house for a year?
Rainbows and butterflys this world is not.