Chip-and-PIN adoption still slow

Supposedly, credit card transactions in the U.S. were going to become considerably more secure by last Oct. 1 – the deadline for merchants and card-issuing banks to be ready to process so-called “chip-and-PIN” cards instead of the legacy “swipe-and-signature” kind.

Some of them are – estimates of the percentage of merchants now equipped with the new terminals range from 17 percent to 37 percent. But even the high estimate isn’t what most people would call “critical mass.”

And if the reality is closer to the low end, that means, as security blogger Brian Krebs put it in a post last month, “U.S. consumers currently can expect to find chip cards accepted in checkout lines at fewer than one in five brick-and-mortar merchants.”

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