> Europe has had chip and pin for decades now (it was already well established on my first trip there in 1998) and we're just getting it now after a ton of major breaches that should have been easily prevented.
There's a lot of misinformation about chip-and-pin (which is not surprising, because a lot of well-funded companies currently have a financial interest not to clarify the misinformation). This has been explained in more detail on the threads about the breaches by others who work on payment systems, but chip-and-pin would not actually have prevented several of the breaches that have happened recently in the US.
Furthermore, the main benefit to chip-and-pin has to do with the liability, not actual security. I'm not talking about the liability shift onto merchants who don't accept chip-and-pin; I'm talking about the situation in which fraud or suspected fraud occurs using a chip-and-pin system. In this case, though, the benefit is entirely for Mastercard/Visa/etc., and not for the consumer.
There's a lot of misinformation about chip-and-pin (which is not surprising, because a lot of well-funded companies currently have a financial interest not to clarify the misinformation). This has been explained in more detail on the threads about the breaches by others who work on payment systems, but chip-and-pin would not actually have prevented several of the breaches that have happened recently in the US.
Furthermore, the main benefit to chip-and-pin has to do with the liability, not actual security. I'm not talking about the liability shift onto merchants who don't accept chip-and-pin; I'm talking about the situation in which fraud or suspected fraud occurs using a chip-and-pin system. In this case, though, the benefit is entirely for Mastercard/Visa/etc., and not for the consumer.