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What stops a server with a good memory from looking at your card as they put it in their terminal and remembering it for the 30 seconds it takes to walk away an
by wiml 4y ago
What stops a server with a good memory from looking at your card as they put it in their terminal and remembering it for the 30 seconds it takes to walk away and note it down? They already reliably remember fairly complicated table orders which have got to have more bits of entropy than a credit card number.
Credit cards handle risk very differently than we do for account passwords. They expect numbers to leak regularly, but the downside of a leak is bounded in a way that password leaks often aren't, and the issuers and merchants eat those losses as a cost of business.
- robertlagrant 4y agoNothing stops them. It's just harder, so fewer people could do it.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoHere in Canada, servers never touch your payment cards. They hand you the wireless card terminal and you insert it yourself. Or you pay on your way out at the front counter at a standard terminal. Even at drive-through restaurants, the cashier hands you the entire corded terminal through the window (well, most of the time contactless payments are used, in which case they simply hold it out for you to tap your card until they hear a beeeep). During Covid, most places mounted them on the end of a stick, and that practice has continued even once social distancing requirements were lifted.
- twelvedogs 4y agoI use my phone it doesn't even show the number, but you can cover the number in case of random servers who can remember 16 digits effortlessly in 2 second No security is perfect but that's no reason to skip basic easy precautions