I think we all need to take a deep breath and think carefully before entrusting our financial information to any large company. That’s not luddism, that’s wisdom. The recent series of security breaches at major retailers alone should give us pause, and Apple is no exception: a company that has shown itself incapable of protecting Jennifer Lawrence’s photo album has to prove to us that it can be trusted with our wallets.

via The Apple Pay Early Adopter Problem. (David Wolf, Silicon Hutong)

I actually do not have anything substantive to say about Apple Pay or how similar services will be adopted in China. I mostly just wanted to acknowledge the above sage advice from David Wolf/Silicon Hutong.

Remember when debit cards were first rolled out in China? E-commerce? I do. I also recall the fears, which I believed to be entirely justifiable, which led to some cautious toe-dipping as opposed to reckless adoption of the new services.

Given some of the bugs that had to be ironed out by the banks and online platforms, it was a smart strategy. Some of those cautions are still with us today, and indeed my use of debit cards in China differs markedly from the way I use them in other countries.

I’d call myself an early adopter for a lot of things, but this is mostly limited to software, where rolling back can be relatively painless. Sure, I recently lost a bit of data when the flawed update to Windows 8.1 resulted in my having to do a factory reset of my Surface, but the harm was minimal.

But when the experiment involves cash, potentially a significant amount of it, caution is never a bad thing.

© Stan for China Hearsay, 2014. |
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