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Comment by zht | Hacker News Reader

The fraud implications aside, as a Canadian living in the United States, I've always found the payment process much more pleasant with magstripe cards. Every time I go home, I find it incredibly inconvenient to have to dip my card in the chip reader, type in my 4 digit pin without feeling like the whole world is looking at me, and waiting for what seems like an eternity for the auth/capture to happen.

With magstripe cards, you just swipe and sign.

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I pay for pretty much everything with a chip-n-pin debit card here in the UK and I feel it is generally much faster than the the old swipe and sign (which always seem very clunky any time I visit the US).

NB The approval step on newer terminals seems to have got a lot faster - I'd estimate the payments step at the Sainsburys self service machines where I usually buy lunch takes about 5 seconds after I enter my PIN.

Plus in the US you often have to show your ID (e.g. driver's licence), whereas I've never been challenged for my ID when using Chip and Pin in Europe.

I probably get asked for ID less than 1% of the time. In general it tends to be in odd locations too. In my experience a less than $20 dollar purchase is more likely to have the employee ask for my ID than a $200 purchase.

It happens to me significantly more than 1% of the time, I'd say closer to 10%. And as you say it has nothing to do with the amount, $8? ID. $500? No ID.

I think it is more related to the amount of fraud the vendor experiences and they get pressure from the processor to reduce it, therefore they implement ID checking to counteract it a bit.

Seldom, while it's true that it does happen occasionally, it ends up being very rare in most places except for very expensive purchases.

> Plus in the US you often have to show your ID

They're not allowed to do that: "Both Visa and MasterCard prohibit merchants from requiring customer ID as a condition for accepting their credit or debit cards. All you need is a signed card, and of course the signatures must match [1]"

[1] http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/02/can-a-mercha...

That's absolutely not the reality on the ground. Just yesterday I got challenged for my ID when making a sub-$10 purchase in the US.

That isn't unusual.

That's not been my experience: I use cards for every single purchase, which adds up to hundreds* per year, and have never been asked for ID. In any case, it's true that they're not allowed to require it. The link I gave above suggests the following as recourse:

"If you're a Visa cardholder and a merchant presses you for an ID, Visa says you should notify your card issuer. In the case of Amex, notify American Express directly. MasterCard customers should report the violation by visiting the company's merchant violation web page."

*Edit: hundreds of transactions per year

They also don't usually ask for an unsigned card.

I (USian) recently visited the UK and knew from previous experience to use only visibly chipped cards (staff will sometimes refuse to take run a swipe-only card -- not sure if the machines don't even support it?) Anyway, the systems never asked for my PIN and printed out signature receipts, which seemed to surprise people.

I think most machines do support swipe cards - though from what I can see they are almost never used (I think I've seen one swipe transaction in the last few years).

Cashier instructions usually include "never ever swipe a chipcard" - since if you allow swiping chipcards at your chain of stores, then you'll get used for cashing out cloned cards, and in this case merchant will be fully liable for that fraud.

So even when the swiping technically works, people have incentives to disallow it.

I've used a magstripe a lot before getting a new card that uses a chip. But even when using a magstripe, I still had to input my pin. Just allowing the card to be used freely on it's own seems reckless, it means that if I drop my wallet, a thief could access not only the cash stored in that wallet, but all the money I have available on the card.

That has nothing to do with the technical difference.

It's just that banks sometimes use the switch to simultaneously disallow a piece of text on a paper as an approval for taking money from your bank account.

Visa payWave and MasterCard Paypass are even better - no swiping at all.

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