Griffiths / A pal in need is a PayPal, indeed

MAYBE once every couple of weeks I’ll get home, light the fire, pour a glass of red and order a pizza online.

There comes a point for most of us where we want comfort food and don’t want to leave the house.

In days gone by we’d have to have had enough cash on hand to pay for the pizza, and the delivery kid lived in fear someone was going to clonk him on the head to steal the float (and probably the pizza, too) having been lured to an address devoid of streetlights.

Some years ago modernity arrived in the form of credit card pre-payment to the great relief of delivery drivers, and also to slobs like me who’d managed to go home without enough cash on hand to pay for a pizza.

Around the same time, PayPal turned up as a payment option on websites and most people said: “Why do I need that?”

If you ran a business and only had PayPal as an option you would be deluged by complainants who didn’t want to use it to make payment.

I resented places that made me use it, despite being involved in a business that relied on it ourselves.

For those blissfully unfamiliar, the basic premise is that to make a purchase on the internet one needs to provide credit card information to the website one wants to buy from.

Everything needed to made a debit on the card has to be sent. Account name, credit card number, security number, and expiry date.

Anyone else with this information can also take money from you.

So keeping it secure becomes a bit of an issue as even low-level crims turn their thoughts from beating up pizza delivery drivers (who no longer carry cash and increasingly carry cameras) to credit card fraud and identity theft.

We trust a few big companies with our credit card details. Apple, Google, Amazon come leaping to mind.

But the local pizza store or some artist who makes a cool T-shirt that will totally have all the other hipsters in the cafe green with irony-induced envy? Even if I trust their personal integrity, do I trust them to keep the digital wolves from the door forever?

With PayPal you give them all your credit card details, trust them to keep them safe, and then they arrange payment (with a fee to the vendor) when you decide you want to buy something on the internet from a company with a valuation less than a billion dollars.

Intriguingly, the local pizza shops are increasingly (just in the last few weeks) really pushing the PayPal option. One suspects they don’t want the responsibility of managing your payment information either.

This is all well and good until the data thieves snaffle your PayPal password over free wifi, or through social engineering.

If you got a phone call out of the blue from someone asking what your mother’s maiden name is would you hang up or answer them? The desire to helpfully answer questions is a deep one for human beings.

Mercifully, so far, PayPal is pretty good at looking after their customers.

A friend of mine had more than $7000 of unauthorised payments made when some lowlife got hold of her PayPal password. Thankfully, I can report they were helpful, supportive and, best of all, gave her the money back.

I’m not thrilled that there’s a new middle-man taking a percentage of every e-commerce dollar, but if I can get that pizza delivered without having to change out of my ugg boots, I suppose I’ll put up with it.

 

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