Facebook Pay(pay.facebook.com) |
Facebook Pay(pay.facebook.com) |
And if you think FB is not a bad company. Can the below examples convince you?
If the below examples cannot convince you. Where do you disagree and where do you think I am wrong?
I know this could be way too real for some folks to answer. Especially for folks who use FB for a living (marketing etc) and for FB employees. So hopefully I can encourage some genuine conversations. :)
[1] - How toxic instagram is for teens - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/14/facebook-documents-show-how-...
[2] - I have blood on my hands - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
[3] - Facebook knew about Russian interference in 2016 US election - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7749740/facebook-knew-russian-...
[4] - Facebook Shadow tracking through FB SDK - https://www.privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/201...
[5] - Cambridge analytica scandal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
[6] - Facebook misled EU about Whatsapp acquisition - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/facebook-fined-e...
[7] Mark lied to Congress (This is the only case I am not sure about AFAIK. So correct me if possible please) - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/390530-dem-lawmaker-sa...
Update: Just got my first down voter. It would be great if whoever down voted could say why. Thanks.
That service is maintained with practically all banks in the country, valid to use with any other person who also have an account, doesn't have any transaction or a monthly/periodical fee, can't roll back payments easily if you screw up, and some other advantages.
However, I wouldn't say there "isn't any movement" in the US. To clarify, what I noted above obviously doesn't preclude or justify the absence of a comparable system that supports at least a subset of US banks. Zelle may one day gain wider adoption in this fashion, and third-party approaches (such as Venmo) already handle most private transactions somewhat reasonably despite relying on ACH transfers for funding rather than first-party bank support.
This doesn’t sound appealing to me. They’re surely storing this biometric data on a server somewhere, right? I use FaceID or my Apple Watch to pay with ApplePay all the time but my biometrics never leave my device.
I don’t follow Facebook all that closely (never used any of its services). Do they have other services that use (require?) face or fingerprint identification? Or is Facebook Pay a sly way for them to start harvesting this data?
£16,50
UK uses commas, but only to separate by thousounds. This makes £16,50 seem like it was going to be £16,500 instead.
Being able to send and receive money to and from friends and family without fees and using real exchange rates could potentially be the only reason to sign in to Facebook.
[1]: Facebook Pay is a seamless and secure way to make payments on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Enter your payment card or account information once and then use Facebook Pay to make purchases, send money or donate within the apps. A PIN or biometrics can be added to secure individual payments. Facebook Pay is also a way to view payment history, manage payment information and access customer support. Facebook Pay is currently rolling out in select countries.
Centralized Social networks like Faceboon and WhatsApp can roll out a payment system nearly overnight and have it accepted at millions of merchants. Crypto after 10 years is hardly accepted anywhere…
"Crypto" is not that.
When people start keeping their balances INSIDE the system, it becomes its own currency. Like when people pay with PayPal without cashing out.
They can print more of it internally, and you wouldn't know. They can have fractional reserves, etc.
WhatsApp and Facebook have huge adoption. By contrast, after 10 years, crypto is nowhere near being a "peer to peer cash system".
Seems like this is 3 years behind everyone else... Which is a bigger issue than the branding itself. I couldn't find one aspect that made it have a competitive advantage over already established brands.
It's confusing since the page says "Facebook Pay is a seamless, secure way to pay on the apps you already use". And whatsapp is listed as one app.
Maybe it's entirely different from UPI based Whatsapp pay.
> What you buy is your business. Your transactions are confidential—and aren't shared to your Newsfeed—unless you choose to share them.
So yeah. Confidentiality is defined as "not shared on your Newsfeed". Safe to assume Facebook is going to milk this data for all it's worth.
There are also some other whoppers:
> If there is an unauthorized Facebook Pay transaction on your account, customer support is always ready to help. Reach out via email 24 hours a day.
All I can say is: I'll believe it when I see it.
I'm no Facebook fan, but let's be honest. Your bank, credit card company, and merchants are all doing exactly the same thing. Perhaps the bank is regulated tightly enough that it isn't quite as bad, but the others definitely are.
And about storage, ok, read this:
Anti-fraud technology monitors purchases on our systems to detect unauthorized activity. Your payment method is not shared with buyers, sellers, or merchants without your consent, and is stored separately from your account data.
And tell me it doesn't say all payment data is stored on FB servers and mined by all their algorithms.
... with a canned response saying "sorry, nothing we can do!"
From the FAQ:
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
"""
Although IIRC Facebook already buys some of this info from data brokers so...
But they do ?
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/consumer-privac...
> In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB).
...
> Under GLB, companies can sell their customers’ financial data to anyone they choose, including credit card information such as the date, amount, and recipient of charges, and the personal details consumers provide when they fill out applications. Consumers have no privacy under federal regulations unless they affirmatively take steps to “opt out” of this sharing, repeating the process for each and every financial service provider who may have data about them.
...
> Even this opt-out option is not available for consumers to stop credit card companies and issuing banks from sharing this data with their financial affiliates and financial “joint marketers,” a vaguely defined term that provides a giant loophole in privacy protections.
PS. Just to make sure - I'm not trying to defend Facebook here, or credit card companies.
Not that I have any objection to the hive mind thinking Reels and VR is the end-all be-all, I want it to think it's a dead business.
Edit: It’s WeChat. The SV giants are chasing the ubiquity that app enjoys.
Because Facebook's core product is failing, and they should have all hands on deck to try to save it.
The terrible thing is is that it's the easiest solution for me and my friend group to send money via Messenger.
The US has _really_ dropped the ball on any sort of easy-to-use, standardized money transfer. Zelle is the closest thing and it is a joke for every day usability.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
I am randomly banned from Zelle for no particular reason. AML misfire, I guess. They won't tell me.
Facebook having another set of datapoints on my personal life does.
I’m surprised it took this long.
Yikes.
Amazing! I love paying!
After using Instagram a bunch, I found the targeted ads got pretty good: most were for things I was interested in, such as tech gadgets or crafts for my kids. However, clicking on an ad and buying something was so much higher friction than the rest of the mobile Instagram experience that I often just gave up.
Since then, I assumed FB must be working on some sort of payment service in order to complete the loop on the ad->purchase funnel.
I don’t trust things I see in Instagram ads anymore, even if the product looks interesting
It would be cool to be able to impulse donate as easily as you can click "Like" when you see some ad for some cause you care about.
I really hate admitting this, but it's been very true for me. I've come across some legitimately helpful stuff that I would never have sought out.
I've actually bought a lot of stuff from IG ads (and there's no other platform that I've ever clicked an ad let alone buying), but I agree with the purchase (which is off-IG anyway) to be of more friction. This can solve this problem by integrating payment into IG.
Especially when you know where the data will end up, what will happen to it next and how the company makes money (98.5% from targeted ads)
It's confusing since the page says "Facebook Pay is a seamless, secure way to pay on the apps you already use". And whatsapp is listed as one app.
Maybe it's entirely different from UPI based Whatsapp pay
However, it can elsewhere including the us.
According to “How it Works”, it supports multiple payment methods like PayPal & Credit cards - I don’t see why UPI couldn’t just be another option on the list specifically for India.
Not that I want to help this company.
It's so fucking confusing now with "Facebook Pay on Instagram". WTF.
Meta Pay is even a catchier name.
I find it weird that they used this branding. For some time now, FB has the "old people social media" label. Also would they create a new brand (or MetaPay or whatever), some people might not connect it to Zuck's trash mentality, morality and overall creepiness.
I wouldn't be surprised if folks working at Meta consider themselves the good guys, like Google cultists do. But I was under the impression that FB->Meta name change was due to public's completely trashed opinion on Facebook.
To be clear, this is not a complaint about tying dynamic effects to scroll position. Apple does those all the time [0][1][2] but at least you will never have a big gap of blank content at the bottom of the page, usually there is fresh content continously immediately visible as you are scrolling. I don't even mind if there is a bit of initial page-loading animation at the start, as long as it's just once.
Does anyone really prefer reading pages like this? It just seems very disrespectful of the user's time, forcing them to continuously wait just to read your promotional copy.
0: https://www.apple.com/iphone-13-pro/
You are not making a deposit as you don’t earn interest and you do not have FCS protection. Given the size of FB I don’t think this is a problem.
(I mean, there are some users - including comments on this page - and they like it. But it never took off.)
They rebranded it as Facebook Pay in late 2019. Morning Brew said at the time: "If Libra is the Thanksgiving turkey you tried deep frying but caught on fire, Facebook Pay is the backup rotisserie chicken."
But it's not actually a payment system. It's just a Facebook-y front end, but the actual payments are handled by Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or your bank.
I believe Facebook Pay is part of the WhatsApp Pay trial in Brazil - though that uses the local PIX fast payment system to reach the bank/credit-card backends.
It's not clear why this is hitting HN again. But Facebook Pay is a thing that a few people use, and which basically hasn't been killed yet 'cos Facebook really wants to get into payments, somehow.
Some risks that would put a halt to this? The EU regulatory bodies in Brussels. They'll find any reason(s) to put some breaks/guardrails and slow down the exponential adoption of FB Pay. Not being too pessimistic, but their mutual relation isn't in the best shape nowadays.
Having said that,I hope this takes off. All of my friends prefer Instagram as our primary messaging app since it takes a username and not a phone number to text someone. It would be helpful, if we could makes payments there.
This is a killer product, it is just 3 years too late. I have no idea why this took so long. It has potential, but will it succeed? Hard to tell, they have lots of competition
I'm skeptical FB is so sketchy as to do this intentionally, but I've also never seen this behavior before.
With this Facebook Pay, I could probably just have paid her from within messenger. Instead I had to open my bank app and have it generate a link, copy that and paste it into messenger. The end result is the same; and with the link it would go straight into her account, but its just a bit more clumsy - using two apps, when with Facebook Pay one will do.
Figured this kind of thing would be common globally considering how far behind the technological curve the UK tends to be.
> How secure is Facebook Pay in online stores?
> To keep your information secure, your debit and credit card numbers are encrypted for safe and secure storage. This information won’t be shared with sellers.
> With Facebook Pay, you can create a PIN or use your device's face or fingerprint recognition to confirm payments. Learn how to set up a PIN for Facebook Pay.
> For transactions you make with Facebook Pay, you’ll receive payment confirmation details in an email. If you see a transaction you don’t recognize, please contact your bank or financial institution.
And
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
For EU countries this would probably be governed by the PSD2 payment services directive and the GDPR data protection.
Specifically, payment transaction data may reveal personal data and using it for other purposes than the payment itself would require explicit consent.
IANAL. It would be interesting if lawyers with up to data knowledge on financial regulations in various jurisdictions could elaborate on this.
There are separate webpages for creating a Facebook ad campaign (Ads Manager is one, plus there is a separate option with less features; I believe this is the Boosted posts function). The Ads Manager also displays a popup that the software might not work fi you have an ad-blocker enabled. For my devices, it’s slow and buggy in any browser except for Chrome.
The UI for managing Pages as a business is also poor. In the past (with previous Facebook Q&A forum posts documenting this), Facebook would automatically convert text posts by a Facebook page into a job listing, without asking for confirmation (!), making it unintuitive to undo. Separately, it also has limited categories for Facebook events (there is no category for educational events; the closest is the “Home” category).
Facebook has also removed certain popular features in the past, such as initially hiding, and then removing the feature to Share a post with the feature to “Keep the original post” (so only the link is shared, but not the post text that accompanied it by the original poster). The feature was lost due to a Facebook redesign, which is baffling because this reduced the likelihood of Facebook users to share content.
Maybe it’s different for larger customers (though I suspect they use the same tools), but the poor UI is frankly ridiculous for paying advertisers. Perhaps it does make sense, though; their competitor is Google Search and Display ads, which also have user interface problems (e.g. refusing to let you publish an ad set you’re willing to pay for, with very minimal messaging as to where exactly the error is, prompting multiple forum posts by other users). It’s effectively a duopoly, as other social media advertising channels are far less effective (maybe not LinkedIn, though LinkedIn is pricier), and newspaper ads are far more pricey (with higher minimum ad spend) with lower reach.
What do you mean by this?
More than half the population of Earth logged into a FB product at least once last month. They don't use it out of love or pity for Zuckerberg. They use it because they fucking love to.
I don't use FB anymore. For more than two years now. But I still keep the account as I have exactly one use case (just anecdata):
There are some very good groups on Facebook for genealogy. Here I can get help when I get stuck again.
So if I continue again with the genealogy efforts I will certainly post there again from time to time.
There are few to no comparable places on the net where I could find the appropriate help.
As someone who has resigned themself to using at least 2 FB products because I can't convince my contacts to switch because the ones who care can't convince their contacts to switch (and so on) I can tell you that we do not fucking love these products. We tolerate them with misgivings, the same way we feel when we put petrol in our cars or eat fast food
Just that they chose to brand it as an attachment to the Facebook product. "Meta" currently operates with moral tabula rasa when it is not referred to as "FB/Meta". Facebook - in both meanings - seems to be disgraced. I was under the impression that the name change was, among other reasons, due to low reputation.
> I think you need to step outside of your bubble.
The issue with living in a bubble is a somewhat distorted reality. I am aware of this and _trying_ not to be shortsighted. I feel otherwise quite comfortable in my moral bubble. Often I have to go out of my way to achieve something, but for me life is about agreeing with self not about making everything easy.
Although I do remember that the US doesn't really have a good/fast way to make instant bank to bank transactions so that could be an issue.
I'm not up to speed on how fast implementation of the 'L2' has been, but this is a very real use case. And no need to open your banking app since delegation to your 3rd party app (Facebook in this case).
The cool thing with USD payments over lightning network is that capital gains tax is not triggered.
I guess that they were blinded by the margin discrepancy, like many others.
For sending money inside a country is easy generally, international payments are much harder.
Yeah, but only the latter is likely to be able to push them into the too-big-to-fail category.
Visual stability is actually kinda underrated.
Really wish animations would go away for the most part. They make sites and tools take longer and force the user to pause between actions when they may not need to otherwise. If the animation contributes something, fine, but if the purpose of a site is to show off pictures and text, just leave the animations out of it.
I remember there were a lot of powerpoint presentations that did this back in the day as well, along with "clipart" cartoon noises with every transition. It's really fun to produce a presentation like that, but everyone collectively agreed that it was pretty tedious relatively quickly.
I do think it has its place for some things but it’s just very badly done here for no real purpose.
And that’s with the typical docs not reflecting the current state.
This doesn't matter so much when sending money to friends, but an expected use case people imagine for facebook based p2p tx is fb marketplace, where you can buy things from random people online. A lot of fraud and sketchy behavior already happens there (eg. buying stolen products). Not being able to have easy reversion of such tx is bad for buyers (and good for fraudulent sellers).
Not sure if you're in the USA, but for US users, banks are pretty hands off this sort of behavior and will only reverse TX in serious fraud issues, but require the loser to pass a high bar to prove its fraud. Normal bank to bank tx is a "pull" model, so middle men services typically offer protection for the buyer to stop a "pull" in the case of fraud. Thats why the US has created many p2p services that are "push" based (eg. venmo, cash app), and why credit cards companies offer protections like charge reversal and take on that risk (you agree that you'll return money in a charge-back as a condition of VISA/etc letting you use the network).
(from parent's parent)
My repeated product/company question was not a mistake. I cannot find any source placing the number of Facebook (product/platform) users anywhere close to "half the population of Earth".
The number of Facebook and Instagram users combined (and WhatsApp even boosts this number) seems more suiting but under the assumption that there are no duplicate users logging to more platforms at least once monthly.
> They use it because they fucking love to.
Since I have already mixed user base and morality topics when pointing out brand choice, I'll allow myself to add: same with heroine users.
The reason why they would want this, in my interpretation anyway, is that there is a lot of product fit to have payments on WhatsApp. The app is widely used outside NA as the communication channel, namely by lots of SMBs that actively use it (see [0], that app is solely used for business owners as it's rather useless for a regular WA user). The monetizing opportunities on WA are deeply tied to SMBs, basically you should be able to operate a business on WA in which case you shouldn't have to go off-app once you get to payment, removing payment-middlemen is probably in the interest of all three parties involved too. Payments are necessary to enable "business over chat", you can also see them working on this with Click-to-WhatsApp/Click-to-Messenger ads and the acquisition of Kustomer. This is all valid for Messenger as well but I think that's more of a TBD, it's yet to prove itself popular for that kind of usage, tho there is a good fit for Marketplace and to compete with Venmo. It's also implemented on Facebook and Instagram for their respective Shops platforms, I don't think there's more to it than that for those.
Just like Apple Pay is a rounding error[1], I wouldn't bet on payments being a significant cash cow, not any time soon anyway, considering Facebook's approach to monetization. IMO it's more about deepening the moat and broadening the utility of the apps, especially WhatsApp as it tries to become something of a communication+commerce+payments super-app for Asia/Latam/Africa (credit cards and phone numbers would be rough to displace in North America and Europe, I sure as hell wouldn't bet on FB overtaking those). A Signal or a Telegram could take over a chatting app (if it somehow reaches, like, 2B people), it would be much harder (as if it wasn't hard enough to beat such a network effect) to take over a chatting app with a built-in suite of features for businesses and a user base that gets accustomed to commercial use of said app.
I could also be entirely wrong, I'm just an idiot that tries to follow the company.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276030/whatsapp-busines...
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1060577/apple-pay-revenu...
'My boyfriend dumped me on this app last week. One star.'
'This app listens to my conversations and serves me ads. One star'.
At best it's the product not the applcation being reviewed. At worst, it's the general public howling at the moon.
This is a bug, not a feature, to the US government.
How ironic is it that you need to move from a brand name to another because you have bad reputation, but still have to use the old name because even with bad reputation, it's still more trustable to handle money than your no-reputation new brand?
Like the pre-google (well, and google search as of now) search engines, being overrun by spam signaled the end of the viability of the product. Either they don't have the resources to defend it, or they don't care. Reason doesn't matter.
They’re also rolling out support for phone numbers as identifiers in addition to email addresses but my bank doesn’t seem to support sending to phone numbers (or registering mine as auto deposit) yet.
With UPI, you can connect your bank account (no matter which bank it is) with any UPI based payment app and create IDs which can be shared for receiving or requesting payments. (These IDs are unique on basis of both app and bank).
So I can connect my bank account to gpay and create a new ID. Send them to others who are using gpay or any other UPI app (bank apps also have UPI functionality built in). They can send the payment to the ID (which will be automatically added to my bank). This is instant.
It can also be used for requesting payment by others and I can accept or decline the request.
Alternatively, phone numbers can also be used to fetch the IDs a person has if you have enabled it (it's by default)
Punch in the mobile number to the banking app and more often than not the mobile's owner name is displayed.