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net.wars: Does he take PINs with his chips?

Some time ago net.wars covered the advent of chip & pin – the "new, secure way to pay", as the Chip & PIN Web site gushes (adorned with a heart). As long-time readers will know, we're not fans of the new system, and last year when Barclaycard sent a new card, we were pleased that the company immediately sent a PINless, signature-activated replacement.

Time passes and so do credit cards, and so it was that HSBC sent a chip and pin MasterCard some months back. A letter requesting a replacement went ignored, and so we very reluctantly picked up the phone to do battle with customer disservice.

And a battle it was. "All our products now are only chip and pin," said the servicebot.

"You must have an alternative," I said.

"No, we only do chip and PIN now."

Of course, this is not possible. "They must exist," I said, and said what I knew to be true: "Under the Disabilities Discrimination Act you must make them available."

She went away for four or five minutes. Horrid noise played.

Eventually she came back and we went round the circle again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. I finally told her to let me talk to whomever she was consulting when she was gone.

To cut to the chase: HSBC's policy is to make chip and signature cards available only to people with a disability.

"Are you disabled?" the supervisorbot asked. "What disability do you have?"

"You know," I said, "Barclaycard didn't have any trouble with this request…"

My point, of course, had nothing to do with whether I was disabled, but with producing evidence to counter the silly statement that PIN-suppressed cards (apparently the correct name for chip and signature cards) did not exist anywhere in the whole of the known universe.

But, my God, is this how people are treated? It's not bad enough to be blind, or suffering from memory loss, we have to add to their woes by grilling them about what's wrong with them at every bureaucratic opportunity? Is there really no room in the branching scripts we send to the service parrots around the world for a little human intelligence?

It turns out that organisations like the Disabilities Rights Commission and the Royal National Institute for the Blind have fought tooth and nail to make the banks to first recognize that not everyone can actually use chip and PIN and then to ensure that people who need the alternative can actually get it.

"What we find most troubling, says a spokesman for the DRC, "is that there doesn't seem to be a very coordinated effort to publicise the fact that chip and signature cards are available to people who might need them." My experience, in fact, is not remotely uncommon.

The situation is about to get much, much worse on February 14, when Chip and PIN becomes mandatory and, in the polite words of the press release, "the option of signing can no longer be guaranteed."

At the same time, because the advent of Chip and PIN has shifted much of the liability for fraudulent transactions onto the retailers, in-person transactions using the signature cards are likely to be fraught as well. "We have had complaints through our helpline that disabled people are being shouted at by staff or told they can't make the transaction."

Retailers may be in for a shock on this one: American credit cards do not carry chips at all, and they all require signatures. You just try shouting at some well-travelled New Yorker that his credit card is inadequate. I dare you.

A pilot study carried out in Northampton in 2003 suggested that something like 750,000 people with low-level dementia will struggle to remember a PIN. People with Parkinson's Disease may struggle to use a keypad though they can write a signature, and blind people are unable to protect themselves against many security risks (being sure they're using the right keypad, for example, or guarding against shoulder-surfing). According to the Chip and PIN people, 83 percent of disabled people say that using a PIN is the same as or easier than giving a signature – but of course that means that 17 percent (which with 10m receiving disability benefit, translates to 1.7 million people across Britain - a hardly insubstantial number) do not.

In April 2004, the RNIB did a mystery shopping study, with results it describes as "very poor". They repeated the exercise six months later, and, says its spokesman, "There was no significant improvement." At that point the RNIB went public with the results of both surveys. The results: only one in five bank branches provided the correct information.

Probably none of this mattered when using a credit card was an optional perk of being well-off. But it isn't like that any more. More and more we do business with people we don't actually know, retailers aren't overly fond of taking cheques (and cheque cards still only guarantee purchases up to £100 in any case), and carrying around large sums of cash has its own risks. And in the US you have even less choice.

The banks know we have no choice. Though the people who read these scripts and make these decisions might like to remember: they're only temporarily abled themselves.

Technorati tags: Chip and PIN, disabled, blind