> Last time I tried swiping my card — and that was ages ago — the terminal displayed something to the effect of "this card has a chip, please insert the chip".
The problem is that the way the terminal knows "this card has a chip" is that information is encoded on the magstripe. So rewriting the magstripe can just disable that functionality. I assume the merchant could configure their terminals to insist on using the chip no matter what, but it's extremely rare in the US.
One thing I don't get is how other countries require chip+pin for all transactions, but a high percentage of the US terminals I read are comically unreliable for using the chip. If we switched to "always require chip", half my typical transactions would fail because of broken chip readers. Why is there such a discrepancy in the quality of the terminals here vs elsewhere?
Huh? I don't know what's the situation now because I hardly use the chip any more, I mostly tap (the card itself, we no longer have Google Pay), but I don't remember a single time when the chip wouldn't work. The terminals around here look like any mass-produced electronic device, nothing special about them. Though they are old — I do sometimes see newer fancier all-touchscreen ones when I travel to other countries.
There's also one weird model with a secondary keypad on a curly cable that they usually put on the counter, with the main unit somewhere out of sight. It has a small screen and can accept taps. But if you want to use the chip, you have to hand your card over to the cashier to have them insert it into the main unit.
> So rewriting the magstripe can just disable that functionality.
That feels strange to me. If I were designing this protocol, it'd have to first ask the issuing bank whether using the magstripe is ok.
> Huh? I don't know what's the situation now because I hardly use the chip any more, I mostly tap (the card itself, we no longer have Google Pay), but I don't remember a single time when the chip wouldn't work.
Wow. My main card doesn't have tap capability, so I'm forced to use the chip all the time. Read failures are extremely common. I even have my own protocol for when it fails: take it out and shove it back in while holding it firmly to the left edge of the slot. If that doesn't work, try again holding it against the right edge of the slot. Sometimes, it's just sloppy alignment in the slot and doing one of those will fix it. If normal, left-aligned and right-aligned all fail, that makes three attempts so the machine will give up and have you swipe it anyway.
It's happened with every chip card I've ever had. Even with ones that were a couple days old. The cashiers often say "yeah, that chip reader has been acting up" so I know it's not me. There's even a subway sandwich place I go to frequently where one day they had a whole brand new POS system with new readers, and it failed on me, and the cashier said "yeah, brand new system and it almost never works."
The Safeway POS grunts this very annoying alarm sound and shows CHIP MALFUNCTION on the screen, and it's just a standard part of my shopping experience now.
The problem is that the way the terminal knows "this card has a chip" is that information is encoded on the magstripe. So rewriting the magstripe can just disable that functionality. I assume the merchant could configure their terminals to insist on using the chip no matter what, but it's extremely rare in the US.
One thing I don't get is how other countries require chip+pin for all transactions, but a high percentage of the US terminals I read are comically unreliable for using the chip. If we switched to "always require chip", half my typical transactions would fail because of broken chip readers. Why is there such a discrepancy in the quality of the terminals here vs elsewhere?