In the wake of the massive iCloud hack that revealed scores of nude celebrity pictures, should you really trust Apple with your credit card information? Even if you think the answer is “no,” the good news is that you won’t have to trust the company when it comes to Apple Pay — instead you’ll be trusting your credit card company’s network.
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Writing over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Yoni Heisler provides the most thorough and informative explanation for just how Apple Pay works and it should ease a lot of fears that anyone has about their credit card information ending up like Jennifer Lawrence’s selfies.
The way Apple Pay works is just fundamentally different from how iCloud works. As Heisler explains, when you enter in your credit card information to Apple Pay, it isn’t stored on the phone or even on Apple’s servers — instead, it’s whisked away to your credit card company’s secure network for safe keeping.
Your credit card company then sends back a 16-number token to your iPhone that acts as a “dummy” credit card number that gets stored on your phone’s secure element. Other than the last four digits of the token, which do correspond with the last four digits of your credit card number, the token’s number sequence is randomly generated and cannot be reverse engineered to decipher your credit card. In fact, the token’s only purpose is to act as an authenticator for authorizing payments with your actual credit card info.
And that’s just the start of it — Heisler also goes into great detail about the additional security measures Apple has taken including its Touch ID system and cryptograms. His entire report is very worth reading and can be found by clicking the source link below.
