> Not for small businesses, they're not. I don't know of a single small business that has ever been audited under PCI-DSS. And these are the ones that will keep your CVC code in the unencrypted spreadsheet on the unprotected laptop they use to track their customers' phone orders.

I help run a small financial services business. We absolutely cannot touch card data (eg PAN) without being PCI DSS compliant. Very Good Security (VGS) exists precisely because of this, there is a market need for PCI-as-a-service. You can in theory ask someone to give you PAN-in-the-clear, but you wouldn't be able to grow a business large enough that one would be "unable to live without" you, per the writer of this article. If you are that kind of a service, you will absolutely face the consequences of not being PCI-DSS, and you have every incentive to just use a service like Stripe or Braintree to process your payments, where it's impossible to get that information in plaintext unless you're PCI-DSS compliant anyway.

> And these are the ones that will keep your CVC code in the unencrypted spreadsheet on the unprotected laptop they use to track their customers' phone orders.

The set of small businesses in the US that don't use Stripe, Square, Braintree, etc to run their payments is so minuscule as to be insignificant. These businesses absolutely do not have the ability to see your CVC code, it's all tokenized.

> Do you realise that there are entire first world countries where credit cards are hardly used? That outside the US, direct payment/debit schemes are widespread? Take a look at one of the big multi-method payment services. They offer hundreds of different options for accepting payments from different places around the world.

Yes? I'm not sure what your argument is here. Debit cards fall under PCI-DSS compliance. We're talking about payment cards, not just credit cards.

> If I have someone's credit card in my hand, then right now I can walk into any shop in the area and buy up to £45 of goods without a question being asked. If I go online, even with just the details embossed on the card, I could buy way more from countless stores. With just a little more widely available personal information about the cardholder, I could buy even more still.

First of all, this is false on its face because you would have to know their PIN. Second of all, the threat model of physical theft of a credit card is extremely narrow. And even there, it's easy to remotely disable a payment card once you know you've lost it. EMV is the industry standard because the actual threat model: replay attacks was identified and neutralized.

> So because Google is in the US, I shouldn't be concerned that everyone holding an Android phone within sight or earshot of me is potentially sending data about me to Google, that everyone I ever send an email to might be sharing the contents of the message with Google, and so on? Sorry, but I simply don't agree. Just because these huge multinationals may be based outside of easy legal reach for me, that doesn't mean they don't pose a danger to me or almost 70 million of my fellow citizens here, or the same for any other country.

It requires tinfoil-hat levels of paranoia to think that merely being within earshot of an Android phone renders you susceptible to surveillance. Unless Google has information on you, personally, it's extremely difficult to correlate background audio noise to you personally, and that would only be possible if you actually went and used Google's services. The only system that has been able to apply this level of indirect surveillance is the Chinese government, but that's because they have your information (by force), unlike Google which you can simply avoid using. And if you're this paranoid about indirect exposure to Google, you can send PGP encrypted e-mails, even to people that use G-mail. You have the tools!