> will always store passwords with bcrypt, sanitize user input and not store any purely private data in plaintext, I'm not going to make a decision about passwo

> will always store passwords with bcrypt, sanitize user input and not store any purely private data in plaintext, I'm not going to make a decision about password security that might mean losing customers. This seems incredibly short-sighted, highly unethical, and a breach of the perceived (or possibly legal, IANAL) fiduciary responsibility of an e-commerce site. You are knowingly and willingly risking your customers' sensitive data and, by extension, their financial well-being in order to benefit in the short term. Edit: In response to the above edit, my whole point is simply that if you are trusting your credit card details to a site, then you should be confident in the security of that site. I meant that it appears from all evidence I've seen that a good heuristic is to say that no creation rules implies an insecure site overall. This won't be true for all sites of course, since it's abductive reasoning, but I think in practice it's useful. Another important point I made is that there is no point in saying "I use bcrypt" as a defense here. If you let users choose any password without any checks, they will choose passwords that are short, common, and consequently easy to crack, even if hashed and salted via bcrypt. It may take 1000x longer than if they were encrypted with just a salted MD5, but we're still talking about effectively instantaneous cracking in either case. I'm not sure why everyone thinks I'm overreacting here. If your users cannot see/access their cc info because it's stored securely via some other service then I suppose that is a lot better, since an attacker cannot actually gain access to the credit card data. Still, it just seems wrong to me to be so insecure about user information simply because they don't understand/care about the potential consequences right now.