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Digital wallets and the “only Apple Pay does this” mythology

Date added
March 28, 2024, 8:13 a.m.
Description
Apple Pay is great, but I think there is some misunderstanding out there about the details of how it works.
Notes

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39844960

Interesting comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39847221

Something that's missing from all of these discussions is that transactions on Apple Pay (and all similar wallets like Google Pay, Samsung Pay etc.) are now just as trackable as those done using the underlying card number.
While the DPAN is unique to a given device, the merchant's payment service provider these days can receive a unique identifier called PAR in the authorization response from the card network. That identifier is consistent across all DPANs for the same card (and aspirationally even across card number changes on the same underlying account).