Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Dealing with transgressors

Visa and American Express have the right idea:

In a first of its kind move, Visa USA and American Express Co. have dropped the hammer on an affiliated payment processor several months after its was revealed that a massive security breach exposed the records of millions of its cardholders.

CardSystems Solutions put the account information of approximately 40 million credit card holders at risk for fraud by mishandling data stored in its database. Customers’ names, credit card numbers and expiration dates were revealed in the breach.

While I’m all for some uniform federal regulation of the dealings with private information, the reality is, it’s good business to drop the hammer on people who can’t keep their houses in order. This will be the biggest single enforcement agent out there.

I would be shocked if Discover Financial and MasterCard don’t dump them just to not be perceived as “weak on privacy.” This is the end of CardSystems, as well it should be.