How safe do you feel when using a debit or credit card?
I'm conducting research on consumer attitudes toward electronic transactions, and would value your input. Here is a link to a brief, 6-question survey (they're multiple choice, so the whole thing will take less than a minute):
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Og7PIeCV9FDPv_2fIcGrDStQ_3d_3d
Thanks in advance - I appreciate your input.
Answers (13)
Very safe. My Visa 5-star credit and MasterCard debit card do not hold me accountable for unauthorized usage.
Marco K.
Creative UX guy, frontend dev. Maker- hacker geek father of two pretty girls. On the lookout for a new career challenge.
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Safe, I did get burned before, but if you keep an eye on your stuff, think about who you give your card to....
Todd L.
Director of Internal Audit at Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole
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I recognize the risks of many payment types. Carrying large amounts of cash entails a risk of loss from robbery. Debit card transactions may be limited by the amount in the related account. Credit card transactions have ongoing risks.
David Little's vendor may not hold him directly responsible, but there are costs involved and the vendor can't sustain losses in perpetuity, so costs are passed along in other ways, such as increased annual card fees, increased merchant transaction fees, increased customer interest rates, etc.
Joe C.
Small Business Maven
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James:
These are two very different questions -- Debit or Credit. As you know they are regulated by two very different laws -- so called Regulation E (Electronic Fund Transfer Act) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, respectively.
I am very comfortable using credit cards because in fact, I am using some else's money to conduct the transaction.
I am not comfortable using debit cards, because I am using my own money. If fraud is committed, the money is withdrawn directly from my account, unlike a credit card.
Debit Cards are great for use in cash machines, but other than that, we suggest that consumers leave them at home or appropriately secured on their person. Use credit cards for all other retail and e-commerce transactions.
Joe Campana
campana@jcampana.com
www.jcampana.com
Rick B.
Network Design Specialist ll at Windstream
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I use my debit card for ATM transactions and my credit cards for all other transactions..
I have a special one that has a low credit limit for most web transactions.
Do diligence is important and I follow up by checking my receipts.
Define safety as things that harm me. If that happens then perfectly safe for credit cards and unsafe for debit cards. Credit cards protect consumers from fraudulent purchases. Debit cards do not. Credit card security is enabled through increasingly stringent merchant security via the PCI Data Security Standard. There is no such mechanism for debit cards.
All in all I feel safer purchasing with my credit card (online and/or as a point of presence transaction) than I do walking around with cash. Debit cards are yesterday's news.
Links:
Tom F. also suggests this expert on this topic:
Clarification added April 30, 2008:
*EDIT* define safety as things that can't personally harm me
I would be happy to take the survey.Good Luck James!
Clarification added April 30, 2008:
Overall I feel safe, but try to stick with the same vendors who I have done business with before. Only trusted sights online. I dont respond to randon solicitations.
Lynn W.
virtualization since Jan68, online at home since Mar70
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In general debit had been considered much more secure than credit since it included two-factor authentication (something you have and something you know).
credit has had a history of all sort of problems being single factor authentication. early on, attackers would just guess valid account numbers. Effectively exp. date has acted as countermeasure to account number guessing. something similar started out with counterfeit magstripes ... and special codes were added to magstripes as countermeasure to account number guessing.
lots of transaction harvesting started showing up ... where the crooks recorded all the information needed for counterfeit/fraudulent transactions. debit was relative immune from this since the PIN was never available. Somewhat as a result ... there has been a lot of increased security processes to protect transaction information harvesting (since it only involved single factor ... didn't have the advantage that debit had with two-factor authentication).
As market moved away from credit and more and more to debit ... "signature debit" was introduced ... i.e. being able to use debit card w/o requiring PIN. Almost overnight this exposed "signature debit" to the history of credit vulnerabilities (account guessing, harvesting, etc).
Stats have been that credit & signature debit (single factor authentication) fraud is 15 times higher than PIN-debit (two factor authentication).
PIN-debit is vulnerable to advancing technologies (by crooks). Assumption that two factor authentication being more secure is based on the different factors having independent vulnerabilities. Newer generation of attacks involving modifying end-point devices to "skim" both the transaction information and the PIN at a single time (invalidating the assumption about two-factor authentication being more secure). PIN-debit is still more secure than signature-debit & credit ... since the major breaches that have been in the news have been about large repositories of transaction information (where the PIN isn't available, security assumption about multi-factor authentication is still valid)
lots of past posts about "harvesting" vulnerability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#harvest
There is some tension between the merchants and the financial industry. The financial industry interchange-charges to merchants for the "higher fraud" items (credit & signature debit) are significantly higher than for PIN-deibt. For some merchants, the credit/signature-debit interchange fees are their largest expense (larger than labor, etc).
lots of past posts mentioning fraud, threats, vulnerabilities, explosts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#fraud
Links:
Ray M.
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Safe, so far.......................
Very safe. I use a debit card almost exclusively. I am not responsible for fraudelent purchases, only purchase online from reputable companies, etc. I have never had a problem.
Remi O.
IS Auditor at United Technologies
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As long as I remember to sign my card, I feel more confident carrying my cards vs. cash. And now with implementation of PCI DSS, and ATM regulations, I feel safer than ever.
It depends on the circumstances. I personally do not let anyone take my card at a restaurant. I walk my card up to the POS system with the server and swipe it myself after what happened to me (see www.noskimmers.com newsroom section to learn my story). An article came out in Nations Restaurant News & stated that 70% of all skimming cases occur in restaurants. Believe it or not, it s safer to input your card on the web vs. giving it to a server in a restaurant!
Links:
I'm not the average debit/credit card user, but as long as the card doesn't have an RFID, I feel very safe to use it. Then again I know how to check for stripping devices and make sure my card isn't out of sight when a transaction is made.
