Nonprofit Group Highlights Privacy Issues in Mobile Payments

Some mobile payment methods are so convenient that you can walk into a store and buy something without even taking your smartphone out of your pocket. But at what cost?

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit organization that focuses on technology laws, thinks privacy is the major tradeoff with mobile payments. Mobile payments can expose payments data to more parties than traditional credit cards do. In the case of Google Wallet, for example, you expose your data to Google, which serves as the mobile payments provider, in addition to credit card issuers and payment processors, the nonprofit group said. Third-party apps can potentially gain access to data, too, it said. Once all the small bits are combined, like the customer’s e-mail addresses, phone numbers and purchase histories, merchants have a pretty detailed customer profile.