this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

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Google Checkout Gains Rapid Adoption

July 19th, 2006

Companies are quickly starting to adopt Google Checkout as a form of payment on their sites according to DailyTech. Ebay is one of the large shopping sites saying that it would not adopt Google Checkout. Even though Google says the method of checkout is not designed to compete with PayPal, it seems kind of obvious that it is doing just that. With such a niche market its hard to say that it’s not a competitor since its basic principle is making and receiving payments.

In any case lots of large online retailers are starting to adopt the system. This is good for Google as well as its customers. It’s good to see that there is a system that does a good job of what it does.

I know in the past I have had lots of problems with PayPal. In a particular case, I had sold a laptop on eBay, but the person who won the bidding had used a stolen PayPal account to pay for the product. Immediately both my PayPal and eBay accounts had been frozen. In order for me to reopen my accounts I needed to provide PayPal with a lot of personal information such as bank information, credit card information, social security number, etc. I could see obtaining some information, but to me that seems like an excessive way to prove that I was legit. Also I didn’t think I did anything wrong and I didn?t feel comfortable giving them all that information.

To this day, I no longer use eBay or PayPal. It’s a shame, but it’s something that I am willing to give up.

  • I checked out Google-checkout.

    The overall process seems to be very easy but exactly that makes this solution very vulnerable. During checkout there was no security question to make sure that I'm indeed the owner of the Google account or the associated Credit Cards in that account. Of course I used my username and password but because there are so many Google sites, using the same username and password, it is very easy to loose your login information on a hijacking page as you might not check the url for Ad-Words or Gmail every time you log on as those services never had the possibility to shop with your Credit Card.
    Now because you have one account and login information for all it is quite possible that hackers will try to get your login information from any Google service out there! Even worth is the fact that the hacker can change the password without any problem. The owner of the account might not even get any information about the password change as the e-mail is sent to the according and hijacked Gmail account.

    Because of this HUGE security risk I would not recommend using Google checkout!
    Please checkout the http://www.thebilliondollarpatent.com as s-registration solution that Google should have implemented in their service to make it solid and secure. This solution is requiring a third credential called TAN to make sure that ONLY the owner of that account is able to shop online even in case the account is hijacked.

    I hope that everybody is aware of the security issue with Google checkout and will inform Google of a better solution!

    Thanks and be safe;-)))!!
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