Continuing the discussion from It’s Time to Move On from Bootable Backups:
In what way?
I pay my credit card bills in full every month and therefore never make an interest payment. And none of my cards have annual membership fees. And I get cash-back rewards for using my card.
I realize that gas stations in some locations impose a surcharge for using a credit card, but that’s not always the case. Even in places where these surcharges are common, there are always stations that don’t impose them. And where I live, very few stations have these charges.
The way I see it, using my card is saving money.
I’ve read all about skimmers in gas pumps as well (Krebs On Security has a great series of articles on the subject). All I can say is that I’ve been paying at the pump for a very long time and this has never been an issue for me.
There have been a small number of attempted fraudulent charges on my card over the past 30+ years. In every case, my bank intercepted the charge, blocked it and contacted me within minutes.
But this is also why love using Apple Pay so much. I’ve read all about how this tech (which includes, to a lesser extent, contactless cards in general), and it is far more secure than using a magnetic stripe.
A stripe contains enough information to clone a card. But the data transmitted by a contactless card (or Apple Pay) does not. The chip in the card/phone is an active participant in the transaction, with the most critical data items protected by device-specific ID numbers and cryptographic hashes, making it exceedingly difficult for a thief to use that data to make a fraudulent transaction or clone the card/device from just the information transmitted during the transaction.
… which the people paying cash pay without getting anything back. Although “cash discounts” are popular in some limited areas (like gas stations), they are far from the norm. They also (at least used to) violate the terms of a credit card merchant agreement.