For bricks and mortar businesses Stripe won’t help much, still need a chip and PIN reader on premise. Square on the other hand does let you outsource the entir

For bricks and mortar businesses Stripe won’t help much, still need a chip and PIN reader on premise. Square on the other hand does let you outsource the entire problem of physical card payments to them, at the cost of much higher fees, as they are the merchant of record so you don’t need to be PCI compliant at all. Which is a real worry as that doesn’t give me much confidence when buying from a square “seller”. Their card reader originally didn’t encrypt data, and at least one model that did encrypt could be bypassed via tampering https://www.zdnet.com/article/square-reader-to-card-skimmer-in-less-than-10-minutes/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/square-reader-to-card-skimmer-... and while their current hardware may or may not have issues, they display a distinct lack of concern for local device security. Defense in depth is the way to go, but with Square you can put your Android/iOS device onto any WiFi network and without any security on who else is on it. Likewise you can download any random app that may look innocent enough but is full of exploits (eg an app that claims to help you manage a customer mailing list so you can grab signups on the same device as you take payments, or an app that claims to help with inventory levels, etc).