Came across this great visual breakdown comparing how Apple Pay and Google Pay handle credit card info. Apple uses on-device chip storage and creates a Device Account Number (DAN), while Google stores payment tokens via its servers. Curious—what do you all think is more secure, and why?

I’ve heard both are more secure than using the card by itself because they don’t share your real card number to the merchant, but I want to know which one I should use in the first place from the perspective of someone who cares about privacy and security. Apple Pay seems to be in more apps, and Apple is generally better in terms of privacy. I do have an old iPhone SE 2016 that I can carry around if Apple Pay is really the better alternative or if I decide to move away from the stock ROM on my Pixel 5 (Google Pay won’t work on GrapheneOS or other custom ROMs). My main question is, is there a benefit to using one platform over another in terms of privacy and security, and is it worth carrying an iPhone around if Apple Pay is really the better option? Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a good one!

From the looks of it, Apple seems to be the real secure payment system whereas Google seems to still track all of your payments data.

My understanding is that when you load your credit card into a digital wallet like Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc., it will create a virtual credit card number, and it is this virtual credit card number that is given to merchants, not your real credit card number. Somehow that virtual credit card number will eventually map down to your real credit card at your bank, but the merchant itself will not see your real credit card number.

In addition, my understanding is that if you remove the card from your digital wallet, and re-add the card back to the same digital wallet, you will get a brand new virtual credit card number.

It seems to me that there may be a privacy use case here.

If you have to buy something in person, and do not want your credit card data to be correlated with other purchases made, you could use a digital wallet.

Of course, now the digital wallet is able to correlate all the purchases you made.

I've never tried one of these digital wallets. Does it have any CYK rules? Can you sign up with any fake name and address?

If so, you could simply load virtual credit cards into your digit wallet which you signed up for with a fake name. It seems like this would be stronger than not using a digital wallet.