Saul Hansell
After two years of development and trial, the credit-card industry has an elaborate system to improve the security of buying over the Internet.
The system, called Secure Electronic Transaction, is to be introduced early next year and promises to make it harder for anyone to steal a credit-card number sent over the Internet. It will also make it easier for shoppers to check on online merchants and for the merchants to authenticate the identity of the shoppers.
Yet the system’s proponents are finding there is a growing backlash among bankers and companies doing business on the Internet. The system, which is often called by the acronym SET, is too slow, too expensive and far too cumbersome for shoppers to use, the critics say.
“SET is not a panacea and it ain’t cheap,” said Allan Weinberg, senior vice president of First Data Corp, the United States’s largest credit-card processor.
First Data is grudgingly building the capability to accept SET transactions because some of its clients have asked it to do so, Weinberg said. But he predicted that a “relatively small” portion of Internet transactions would use SET.
The controversy is another reminder that electronic commerce, like the rest of the Internet, has flourished on simple technology developed in small steps by users, rather than by complex systems designed by experts. And it highlights how problems that seemed insurmountable, such as consumers’ fear of using cards on the Internet, can vanish in months.
The added security of SET seems unnecessary when fraud on the Internet is miniscule, but credit-card companies argue that they are pushing SET now to stay ahead of criminals who will eventually find ways to exploit weaknesses in the current system. – New York Times