One of the biggest costs of hacking of businesses is the access achieved to data that should not have been stored in the first place, data that was no longer necessary to the business.
Software too often has not been designed to protect the data security interests of shoppers, those folks handing over their data.
In our POS software made for local specialty retailers we now even better protect the customer.
When we found the extent to which customers were storing credit card numbers through our software we felt there was no choice to act. This benefits the customers of our customers and makes our customers themselves less of a target as valuable data like credit card numbers is not available.
We let our customers know about this a while back …
In the past, we allowed you to store customer credit card data for various convenience related reasons. However given recent hacks etc it is no longer feasible to allow you to store this data against customers in Retailer. In version 3.2 this data is permanently deleted as part of loading the update.
If you are still using the stored credit card data you will need to migrate this data to another service that can store this data securely before loading the update.
Our recommendation is that you use Stripe (https://stripe.com/au) We use this service ourselves and have found it to be easy to use and very secure.
Anything we can do to help retailers be less of a target and be less exposed to themselves enabling the stealing of valuable customer data is good in our view.
Too often we see software, especially in big businesses, storing data that is not needed beyond the one off use, data that is valuable to criminals who can either on sell it or use it themselves in fraudulent transactions.
Our role as software developers is to provide tools that are useful and socially responsible. The increased incidence of hacking means we need to be more vigilant than ever, to protect our customers and to enable them to protect their customers.
The work we have done in this area of customer data protection goes beyond what we write about here today.
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