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Comment by hooplarbazaar | Hacker News Reader

That's very disingenuous. Amazon, PayPal and Google rely on selling your data and selling you products based on your data to make money. Visa, Mastercard and Amex mostly rely on transaction processing fees, and make extra money on the data processing in a very limited way.

What Apple are doing is removing the middleman, purely making this about transactions, not data. This means they're avoiding selling private information as a revenue stream.

This affects you, it causes a filter bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble and means you're effectively less free to make a truly informed decision.

So not sharing your private information by default, is fundamental to your freedom. That's why we should all care, and why this is a great decision by Apple.

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It's not that I don't care about this; it's that Apple is doing this cynically and for short term gain, not for substantial benefit. If they care about this as more than a marketing ploy, they would have set up an organization to set policies and to verify adherence. That would have been awesome.

"blah blah blah, and we don't store your financial information or transaction history. That's easy to say, but the pendulum has swung too far away from protecting our rights as consumers, so today we're doing more than that; we're announcing the Financial Information Security Organization and we're inviting companies to join us in making sure that all of our financial information is secure."

While I share your intentions, as a practical measure, I doubt Apple could have dictated those terms to their financial partners. Have you ever tried dictating terms to a bank?

De-facto useless organizations like your FISO example with not enough players on board to start with are just lip service. Essentially you're arguing that Apple should be doing the governments job...

    I doubt Apple could have dictated those terms to their financial partners.
    Have you ever tried dictating terms to a bank?

Why are we talking about banks? They have loads of partners besides banks/financial-partners...

    De-facto useless organizations like your FISO example

Having been involved with or setting up [non-financial] organizations, I would hope not to make useless suggestions...

I'm suggesting something along the lines of BrainTree's data portability organization (http://www.portabilitystandard.org/). Apple should be able to get a raft of players on board for something along those lines. If not, my original point stands: Apple was making a useless gesture.

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