Apple Pay or CurrentC?

(10/29/2014) Recently, CVS and Rite Aid announced that they will not support Apple Pay. The reason of not-supporting Apple Pay was revealed by New York Time: several retailers (including Walmart, Best Buy, CVS...) are working on a mobile payment platform CurrentC. Supported by these retailers, CurrentC (based on MCX, Merchant Customer Exchange) can save those supporting retailers 2%~3% of commission, which the retailers pay to credit card companies.

Well, it turns out that CurrentC is not that safe at all. They have sent out email to users that "unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of you." (Did Apple do that? just kidding.) In Chinese, we have a saying "三個臭皮匠，勝過一個諸葛亮," which means "Two heads are better than one." However, if most retail heads are incompetent in data security, no matter how many head they form an alliance, they will not be competent either.

What platform will you support? I don't think CurrentC will back off anytime soon because 2% saving is too good to let go.

Data Breaches in the US

(9/29/2014) Here is a list of data breaches in recent years.

Company -- Time of news -- Impact -- Type of data breaches
Post Office (USPS) -- November 2014 -- 500K employees and some customers-- Employees email, SSN, telephone #'s
CurrentC (MCX) -- October 2014 -- Unknown -- emails hacked
Dairy Queen -- August to October 2014 -- 395 stores -- consumer credit cards
Home Depot -- September 2014 -- 56 millions -- consumer credit cards,
Target -- December 2013 -- 40 millions -- consumer credit cards,
TJ Max -- March 2007 -- 46 millions  -- Consumer credit cards (unsecured network)
Heartland Payment Systems -- January 2009 -- 100 millions cards & 650 financial companies -- Credit card data
Sony -- May 2011 -- More than 100 millions -- User personal data