Re: [w3c/webpayments-payment-apps-api] Why does a Payment App need to see the line items? (#91)

@marcoscaceres said:
> It doesn't seem to address the privacy concerns.

Right, not to mention the competitive issues. In one of our very first Web Payments IG meetings, one of the largest retailers in the world said (and I'm paraphrasing) "We are not interested in sending what our customers are buying to companies that are going to mine that data, sell it, or use it to take our customers away."

The "payee-provided line items" list that we have today enables the largest browser vendors to capture and filter that data to their data mining operations. When this was raised, it was mentioned that payees could just put in vague line items.

... which raises the question if line items in the browser are going to end up being useful, or if most large retailers will opt to not include those items.

There is another set of proposals that is being discussed in the Web Payments IG around digital receipts, which would most likely be delivered to payment apps if the system was implemented. Yes, this raises a number of privacy concerns as well. Some of us are exploring ways to mitigate these privacy concerns (like supporting a "DO NOT RESELL / DATA MINE" flag.

All this re-raises the question of the usefulness of having line items displayed to the buyer when some of the largest retailers may opt to not use those line items at all. Especially if those line items don't get sent to the payment app. That means that only the browser is privy to those line items and then only for building a display to show the user.

 The original proposal we had made with the Community Group proposals, which agrees far more with your more recent submission @marcoscaceres, was to simplify PaymentRequest so it was just about a payment (and not also about line items, billing address, shipping address, etc.). While we see the benefit of collecting billing address and shipping address, we are not convinced that the retailer will choose to not use PaymentRequest because line items aren't displayed to the individual (and therefore, they will have to provide a shopping cart list before payment is made, which they do anyway).

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