Kevin Rose demonstrates Square for the iPhone

John Brownlee ()

Digg founder Kevin Rose has become an investor of the Square iPhone payment system (which was in turn created by another social networking visionary, Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), and so he’s posted an informative video tour of the technology on YouTube.

The pitch is great: Square allows anyone to take credit card payments on their iPhone, just by purchasing a cheap card swiping dongle and the Square app. Square takes a slice off the top and passes the rest of the money onto you. This technology isn’t just aimed at the small businesses: you could use it to collect rent, donations, loans from your parents, blackmail money, you name it.

The technology also looks good. An amount is entered, a card is swiped, a signature is taken, and then an email is sent to the customer along with the GPS co-ordinates and Google Maps location of where the purchase took place. It doesn’t seem like a system that is optimized to turn around transactions quickly — the signature and email entry portions of the process seem likely to hold up a line — but it works about as well as can be expected.

Security is the biggest, most obvious concern I have about Square. I have no doubt Square itself is on the up-and-up, but I don’t know that I would be particularly willing to hand my credit card over to a stranger walking up to me with a cheap plastic dongle sticking out of his iPhone.

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What’s stopping someone from jailbreaking their iPhones and programming a dummy app that looks like Square, but just records the credit card numbers? Even if the Square system is a totally secure way to make credit card payments, the iPhone is a vulnerable platform, and that’s worth some worry.

6 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps, News, Software |

  • erica

    wow thats pretty siick!

  • DJB

    Why all these extras? The phone is unique, the sim card is unique so with some hashing and bashing you can manage all security. A simple app and you can do transactions from the phone with no additional hardware. The initiative is good, the idea is i.m.h.o. traditional and takes too much extras to be massively used

  • paul

    great idea for small and up coming sellers but in most countries now accepting chip cards and not swipe cards its a bit pointless and wont work with most cards.

  • brandy

    well, obviously being able to slide the card saves time, but I think how small it is, people will not trust it. If your going to go that route, get something that looks more traditional and is larger (still portable). this is all about making the customer FEEL more secure, and traditional, and about speed.

    I like the signature feature, and the GPS/email feature.

  • Ian

    I have to admit, there is no way in hell that I would trust that device.

    I don’t know much about credit card security but I do know that there are card skimmers out there and this is essentially that.

    As mentioned already, there is the very distinct possibility of Jailbreaking and creating a professional looking app that does harm.

    I can’t see that I would trust any type of device unless it was supplied by a bank.

    However, there are people who would trust it and would use it. For the rest of us, we’ll have to stick with cash ;)

  • ccj

     US peeps: ever heard of chip & pin? lol