from Hacker News

Hi HN, I'm working on a project and I just wanted to get a general feel from peers with a pulse on public perception. I'm caught between working on hardware to read banking cards via the audio jack and via optics (i.e. Card IO). Also as a heads up, I'm keenly aware of Apple phasing out the audio jack in favor of their lightning interface and the pros and cons of both implementations.

The problem is while this optic based data extraction is low-cost and democratizes card data gathering amongst other things, I don't believe it will grow in popularity because people generally don't trust the technology with private data. The concept of you putting your banking card up in a specific frame and a snapshot taken (even though it's not saved) will not resonate with a society already plagued with various privacy concerns. It will also be hard to process the numbers on older, heavily use cards with recessed numbers etc.

I'm curious to know what you all think about this growing movement of data extraction at the cross section of mobile payment processing.

Thank you.