Cold hard cash is becoming more and more rare these days. People just don’t carry it around much any more. So how do you split a bill at a restaurant or buy from a street vendor? Many people today use mobile payment apps like Venmo, Apple Pay, PayPal, the Cash App, or a service promoted by many US banks called Zelle. While convenient, are these payment systems safe? Most of them actually are pretty secure (though some of them are not very private, like Venmo). But because most of these apps draw directly from your bank account, if you send money to the wrong person, either by mistake or because you were scammed, that money is pretty much gone. Ironically, this is very much like physical cash. Specifically, protections many people assume they have against fraudulent bank transactions don’t really apply. You explicitly made the transfer and therefore many banks will not reimburse you for the loss.

In other news: Optus confirms massive data breach; Optus breach triggers privacy regulation review in Australia; Facebook shuts down propaganda campaigns from Russia and China; Facebook warns 1M users of potential credential theft; Google will be migrating Fitbit customers to Google accounts; Microsoft adds new protections to warn you of PC password reuse and insecure storage; the FTC is pushing for new rules around location data collection and sharing; Google releases new tool to help purge personal information from its search results.

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