Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> IANAL but they are not a government or financial institution and do not have a right to that information.

As soon as you purchase something from Microsoft - e.g. your Office 365 subscription - they have at the very least your billing address on file for the credit card.

View on HN

We gotta stop normalizing that. Why do you need my address to receive my money? My birth date?

Even in places with strong privacy regulations requiring businesses not to collect data they don’t need, businesses apparently get away with asking this.

The problem is CC processors. You can get away as a merchant with just a number and expiration date, that's the minimum you need to process a CC payment, but you pay exorbitantly higher fees. The more details you collect and pass on, the lower your processor's risk fee will be because the more info, the more likely it is that the customer is actually the cardholder and not using fraudulently obtained data.

And as soon as you connect with telephony systems (e.g. VoIP numbers) or rent out servers, some countries' telecom KYC laws apply that also force MS to collect validated address data.

Even without the CC processor requirements they would want to be able to identify you in case of a payment dispute. Digital payments are more like an IOU than like cash.

Right, but they’re avoiding that risk by passing on a risk to the customer, that their PII will be mishandled.

Because handling that PII is not only cheap, it’s profitable!

In the rest of the world CC processing uses a PIN code + online revocation check (when the card is present) or a redirect through your bank (which hopefully uses some type of 2FA). Works a lot better & safer, and you should wonder why they pretend to need to violate your privacy in the USA…

> Why do you need my address to receive my money?

Because of the volume of stolen credit card numbers. If you have the address, you are much less likely to be someone using stolen CCs. Seriously, most of the crooks are that lazy. So the real reason is the credit card processing companies.

Also, post 911, there is this thing called "know your customer". It was set up to fight money laundering and financing terrorists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

Seems to me that it's a challenge to make an apple account without adding a credit card to your account as well. A carfully chosen Linux distro (so many options!) is the way to avoid the brunt of these privacy issues, lots of open software calls home in some way or another so user beware!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com