Retailers Fighting To No Longer Store Credit Data

Technical Writing Geek writes with the news that the retail industry is getting mighty fed up over credit card company policies requiring them to store payment data. The National Retail Federation (NRF) has gone to bat for store owners, asking the credit industry to change their policies. The frustration stems from payment card industry (PCI) standards and new security measures going into place across the retail experience. Retailers are now trying to point out that many of the elements of the standard would not be a requirement if they didn't have to store so much payment data. "Even if the NRF's demands were immediately met, it would take several years before retailers could purge their systems and applications of credit card data, he said. Over the years, retailers have collected and stored credit card data in myriad systems and places -- including relatively old legacy environments -- and they are just now realizing the data can be a challenge, he said. Purging it can be a bigger headache because the data is often inextricably linked to and used by a variety of customer and marketing applications; simply removing it could cause huge disruptions."

While were at it

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's ditch social security numbers too. Once we purge everything, we can come up with a new, unique, impervious to fraud, uncrackable new id for each person and their various accounts.

Wait what?

[techpawn]

several years before retailers could purge their systems and applications of credit card data

TRUNCATE TABLE Customer Data

There ya go!

A service for those who don't want to RTFA

[pushing-robot]

"Retailers: In the interest of preserving your privacy, we'll all put your information into a single database instead of scattering it among lots of little ones."

Re:Wait what?

[jmyers]

"Yeah..but what happens to all the "INSERT INTO CUSTOMER_DATA" calls sprinkled all over the 20 year old legacy spaghetti code?"

5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/local/bin/purgeCustomer_Data.pl