Acidus wrote:
] A great way to protect all types of transactions. The Credit
] Card companies refuse to adopt it because it anonymizes people
] and their transactions, and thus they would no longer be able
] to sell the data.
]
] Hashing is your friend

SET was developed by Visa. My take is that its a little over engineered. It provides purchaser anonymnity, but not merchant anonymnity, with the primary advantage from the credit card company's standpoint being that merchants cannot commit fraud.

Amex has a much much simpler approach. You can input your credit card number into their website, and they will give you another number which is good for one transaction. You can use it with a merchant and buy stuff, and after the one transaction that number is useless and the merchant has no way of correlating data about you.

Visa has run several experiments with this kind of technology. I absolutely loved the visa-cash system they deployed in Atlanta around the time of the olympics. But people didn't get it. Americans have a pitifully slow technology adoption rate. So visa-cash went away. There wasn't enough interest to sustain it. Visa has a smart card credit card. If you want to see more technology like this in your credit card you have to demonstrate demand. Get a high tech Visa, or Amex card, and use it.

RE: Secure Electronic Transaction Specification