PayPal offers secure way to shop non-PayPal sites

PayPal is set to release a convenient way for its customers to make payments on Web sites that don't accept PayPal directly.

The story "PayPal offers secure way to shop non-PayPal sites" published November 18, 2007 at 11:20 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[matthewcsims]

Neat

This right here is probably the number one argument against biometrics. You get a unique number that changes every time a transaction is made. Why is that a more secure way? It is because if someone gets the number it doesn?t matter. It won?t work next time.

Biometrics are the complete opposite. It may be hard to fake someone?s finger print or eye scan, but once figured out you?ve has lost your identity forever. I can?t just get a new finger print.

I would like to see the credit card replaced by a USB flash type of device that digitally signs a hash of the transaction when used with a pin number. Using a public key the transaction could be authorized, but only the device would know the private key used to sign it. No reason to have the account number visible right on the card. Lost it? Was it stolen? Deactivate it and get a new one.

You shouldn?t be able to get it activated without actually going down to the bank and signing for it either. Pay a small fee, but that would stop thieves from getting a card in your name, and having it mailed to a separate address.

What if they had a fake ID? Well maybe the nice lady at the BMV could put ID?s in a photo scanner before issuing it to you. Then the nice police officer, employer, or bank employee can type in your driver?s license number into a computer that accesses a special little database that brings up the scanned version of the ID. If any information was different from the ID she was holding compared the nice little scanned image, then it is obviously a fake.

It wouldn?t stop every form of fraud. But it wouldn?t hurt.

[wjsteele]

It's still PayPal

It's still PayPal. The big problem that I see with PayPal is that the more transactions you do through them, the more likely you are to run into an issue. They are not a bank, nor do they afford you the protection of a bank or credit card issuer. Their rules are designed to protect PayPal, not the card holder.

When a problem is detected, they lock your account. It's happened to me three times in the past year and every time nothing was wrong. It takes days to fix and in that time, you can not use your account to get money out of it. (They will happily take more of your money, but you don't get access to any of it.)

They also have the "right" to block access to your own accounts, like associated bank accounts and credit cards.

Check your own credit card companies and see if they are already providing a service like this. Mine is and I will continue to use it instead of PayPal whenever possible.

Incidently, when I use PayPal, I actually only pay with one Debit Card that is associated with a bank account solely for my PayPal purchases. There are no additional funds in that account except what I need to cover their transactions. It's my protection from them. If they block the account, then they're not hurting me... just preventing their own transactions from working.

Bill

[matthewcsims]

Same

We use the same procedures in our house.

[TaintDeli]

Umm, this is new?

I could've sworn that back when I started using PayPal (maybe 5 or 6 years ago) they had an option to generate a one-time-use MasterCard number for non-PayPal sites.