Personal information on transactions

I was just wondering what kind of personal information vendors get access to whenever I make a payment via chip & pin.

Do they get access to my card number or any personal info such as my name and home address?

Thanks!

(Answered in chat - thanks!)

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Card number and expiry

Maybe name as well.

I have inserted an RBS card in a railway ticket machine before and my name came up on the display!

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That would have come from the card itself :slight_smile:

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Don’t they also get the CVV?

So in other words they do get it but they can’t store it. So yes.:yum:

Yes, this is how they process the payment. :slightly_smiling_face:

They will not receive any of this information from Monzo. Though there is a name field on the card’s chip, we do not fill it out (it’s very rare for a UK bank to do this, more common in the US).

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I’m still waiting for an answer from Starling Bank about why their debit cards (or at least mine) store details of transactions on the card. This data can be read with a mobile phone and free card reader software (and presumably contactless terminals in shops).

It doesn’t overly concern me, but maybe it should. Someone on this forum said that maybe it was just a default setting they didn’t turn off. Maybe @Rika knows more about this from a Monzo point of view and whether that sort of functionality is default, or whether they decided to turn it off for Monzo debit cards?

i have this transaction data appearing on 80% of my bank cards so it appears a common occurrence

Interesting as it is only on less than 10% of my cards so I assumed it was an unusual practice. The other one is TransferWise.

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Sorry for bumping this old thread, but was just wondering if you ever got a response from Starling?

The most I ever got from Starling was “This is something we are aware of on our cards, when the cards are manufactured this is on the cards themselves.”

Now as unhelpful as that was, I did get a much better reply from someone (not from Starling) on the Starling forum. I’ll find the link and post it below… oh wait, they closed their forum with useful information on it!

It seems the MasterCard software that is used to program the cards has this setting by default. It can be changed by the bank if they wish, but apparently Starling (and some others) don’t bother. Maybe they didn’t know the feature existed. I certain got the impression they were totally unaware of this in their earlier non-informative responses.

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I don’t know how Starling do their card personalisation but we used to have this enabled on the prepaid cards. We turned it off on current account cards so we could use the storage (taken up by transaction history) for more exciting things like putting Oyster season tickets etc. on there!

No one has done this yet but I’m keeping my fingers crossed - it would be awesome :raised_hands:

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Can you confirm that having it turned on is the default in the programming software? That was mentioned a couple of times elsewhere.

Yes, would be very exciting to see the Monzo card have other uses :slight_smile:

How did you find out? Is the data unencrypted and available from an NFC tap, for example?

Yeah, just for fun I would like to know how you do this.

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There used to be an app on the Play Store for this but it is no more :frowning:

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The author seems to have pulled the free version and made it paid only :frowning: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nfc.credit.card.reader.pro2

But the library for reading card data is still available: https://github.com/devnied/EMV-NFC-Paycard-Enrollment

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My app is called Credit Card Reader Pro. It does look like it has been replaced by another app now as @jscheah said. There do seem to be others though. I did look for one that seemed legitimate because as someone pointed out, you don’t want your card details stolen this way!

Would only the season ticket go on the Monzo card or could you somehow link an entire Oyster card, which someone’s bought from TfL, to the Monzo card so when people tap in using their Monzo card, the Oyster card is charged?

If this was the case, the physical Oyster card could then be connected to any railcards (for discounts), season tickets, be topped us as usual etc… and then left at home. Even a Student or Young Persons Oyster card could be connected. There would be a challenge with using the Monzo card to pay when the Oyster card is out.

Not sure what stage this implementation has reached yet - fantastic idea though.

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