Hasta La Gadget!

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered Mastercard to start providing competing payment networks with the information they need to process debit card payments. In a proposed enforcement action announced on Friday, the FTC said Mastercard had allegedly violated a provision of the Dodd-Frank act known as the Durbin Amendment by prohibiting merchants from routing transactions over alternative networks.

The action targets “tokenization,” the technology that underpins mobile payment applications like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. When you go to make a debit or credit card purchase with your phone’s mobile wallet, the software substitutes sensitive information, including the primary number associated with your account, with a separate set of single-use “tokens.” Mastercard and Visa say the practice prevents fraud since tokens contain no exploitable information when they’re in transit. It’s only when they arrive at Mastercard or Visa’s servers, and they’re mapped back to their original account holder, that they point to someone.

According to the FTC, Mastercard has historically stopped competing networks from accessing its token vault. That means whenever consumers decided to pay with a mobile wallet, merchants had to route the transactions over Mastercard (or Visa) and pay the company’s transactions fees, which are typically higher than that of its competitors. The Durbin Amendment calls for banks to support two competing payment networks on all debit cards. It was a provision Congress introduced to promote competition among networks. The FTC didn’t say if it reached a similar agreement with Visa.

“While we are taking these steps to bring this matter to a close, there should be no question that tokenized transactions provide an increased level of protection to both consumers and merchants,” Mastercard spokesperson Seth Eisen told Bloomberg. “This focus on security guides our efforts in a highly competitive market and provides the incentive for us to continue investing in innovations that promote the peace of mind every person expects.” Eisen added Mastercard would “continue to work to update our processes to comply with the consent order and provide even greater choice.”

The FTC plans to collect comments from the public before voting to finalize the order against Mastercard.

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Twitter says it’s working on bringing back the #ThereIsHelp banner, a feature that pointed users to suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources when searching for certain content. On Friday, Reuters reported that the company had removed the safety tool earlier in the week on orders from Elon Musk.

After the outlet published its story, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, confirmed the removal but said it was temporary. “We have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that,” she told Reuters. “We expect to have them back up next week.”

On Saturday morning, Musk denied Twitter had ever removed the feature. “The message is actually still up. This is fake news,” Musk wrote on Twitter, adding, “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.” When Engadget tired searching for terms like “suicide” and “COVID-19” on Saturday afternoon, the banner did not appear.

Moving forward, Irwin told Reuters Twitter plans to adopt an approach used by Google. She said the company “does really well with these in their search results and [we] are actually mirroring some of their approach with the changes we are making.”

The disappearance of the #ThereIsHelp banner, even if it was only momentary, led to criticism of Twitter from some consumer safety advocates. Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a former member of the company’s recently dissolved Trust and Safety council, told Reuters she found the event “extremely disconcerting and profoundly disturbing.” Rahman also pointed out companies typically work on safety features “in parallel,” leaving existing ones in place before replacing them.

In the US, you can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or 800-273-8255.