There have been substantial changes to Mobilepay’s operations, which are justified by security and reducing misuse. In the case of one change, however, the company has begun to think about alternatives, reports Aamulehti.
The operation of the recently renewed payment application Mobilepay has undergone some essential changes with the update.
For example, you can no longer use Mobilepay with a made-up name or even just a first name, as the user data is retrieved from the official register.
Mobilepay justifies the change by improving security, because it is now more difficult to misuse the service than before.
Even secret numbers can be found
Although Mobilepay’s search function only works with a phone number, the application can be used to search for a person’s real name. If the person’s phone number is known, you can use Mobilepay to check their full name, as long as they have a Mobilepay account.
– If the person doesn’t have your phone number, he won’t be able to find it under your name, Mobilepay’s support pages state.
The application works the same as before, but previously when searching by phone number, you could see the user’s nickname or another made-up name. Now the application shows the user’s full name with all first names.
In situations where the user does not want to share his name information with others, Mobilepay simply advises to avoid sharing his phone number with other than trusted persons. If necessary, you can now also block another user in the new application.
On the support pages the question of whether other users can find the owner of a secret phone number using that phone number has also been answered. The answer is yes, even if the support pages express the matter in a roundabout way. Mobilepay therefore does not take into account in its search tool whether the phone number in question is secret or not.
Country manager for Aamulehti: “Not quite appropriate”
Morning paper interviewed Vipps Mobilepay’s country manager for Finland Perttu Kröger of using the application in this way.
– It is not entirely appropriate for consumers to use Mobilepay as a number lookup service, but the logic is necessary to confirm the payer’s information before accepting the payment, Kröger stated to Aamulehti.
Mobilepay says on its support page that displaying the customer’s full name is also common practice in banking services.
However, according to Kröger, Mobilepay has begun to find out – due to the surprisingly large amount of feedback received on the matter – whether it would be possible to display, for example, only the user’s official nickname in the application.
– However, we do not want to go back and enable the use of an alias and increase the risk of abuse towards our users. In the future, name information will only be retrieved from the official register, he stated to Aamulehti.