[w3c/browser-payment-api] Storing card information (#199)

The flow in the current "Basic Card" spec has an annotation to the effect of "Merchant can store card details for future use (aka 'card on file')."  I think this is actually behavior we want to discourage very strongly, rather than encourage.

The current web environment -- absent webpayments -- does lead to a situation where it is very much in merchants' interests to store credit card information, as the only other alternative is requiring customers to re-enter the information for each purchase. With the API that we're designing, this rationale goes away completely: since the user agent will store credit card information, the merchant site only needs to call the API to retrieve the card information whenever it is needed.

This provides a number of benefits.

First, it removes persistently stored credit card information from the middle of the network, where is it demonstrably vulnerable to capture by hostile parties. There have been a large number of high-profile cases recently that arise only because of the tendency to store card information. We can help the web move away from that.

Second, it provides users the convenience of only needing to update changed credit card information once -- in their user agent -- rather than once per merchant. Since the merchant can interact with the UA to retrieve completely up-to-date information, we can eliminate the friction of web sites having to request updated expiration dates, and eliminate the hassle of updating myriad web sites when assigned a new credit card number (e.g., due to a lost card).

Finally, this approach provides the user additional information, agency, and control over their information, as they can be presented with indicia and/or controls any time payment details are accessed.

I would propose (a) removing the suggestion of storing credit card information from the flow, and (b) adding text strongly discouraging sites from storing credit card numbers, in favor of querying the user agent each time.

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Received on Monday, 16 May 2016 22:43:29 UTC