AT&T To Use Phone Geolocation To Prevent Credit Card Fraud 228
jfruh (300774) writes "Imagine you've spent years making credit card purchases in your home state of California, and suddenly a bunch of charges appear the card in Russia. Your bank might move to shut the card down for suspected fraud, which would be great if your account number had been stolen by hackers — but really irritating if you were on vacation in Moscow. AT&T is proposing a service that would allow customers to let their bank track their movements via their cell phone, to confirm that you (or at least your phone) and your credit card are in the same place."
Buying a new phone (Score:5, Insightful)
You're screwed if you break your phone and then go to the store to buy a replacement.
Re:Or call your credit card company ... (Score:4, Insightful)
>Or call your credit card company before you leave and say you will be traveling in country X on these days.
Tried that. They still blocked the card after my first transaction abroad.
You are making the mistake of thinking banks have processes that meet your needs, rather than their needs.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like a disaster for someone trapped overseas. It sounds more like a way for AT&T to force customers into the trap of using their cell phone overseas.
Re:Or call your credit card company ... (Score:5, Insightful)
A text whenever your credit card was used saying "Card with number ending in xxxx was used in location yyyy, if this was a fraudulent charge reply to this text" would work just as well without the privacy issue of tracking locations.
Re:Or call your credit card company ... (Score:3, Insightful)
THANK YOU! Somebody FINALY got what's really going on here. This isn't about helping customers (at all) it's about AT&T attempting to find an "EXCUSE" to keep and monetize location information. This is a VERY bad idea for consumers.
domestically stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
nothing in TFA (or the ATT page it links to) say this is **international only**
I did note this in TFA however...
this is tracking your phone, all the time, and letting your credit card company access the data
I see this as using fraud to justify spying on you