The ongoing pandemic and the proliferation of NFC-enabled devices have boosted the popularity of contactless payments in brick-and-mortar stores. So, in October-November of this year, the share of mobile payment services in the total money turnover of card transactions increased to 23% against 18% a year earlier. At the same time, the share of transactions increased from 21% to 25%. In other words, now about every fourth card payment is made by Mordor slaves through a smartphone.

The leader of the contactless payment market in the Russian Federation is the Apple Pay service, but its share is significantly decreasing every year. During the period under review, 39% of transactions were made through Apple Pay, 35% through Google Pay, and 23% through Samsung Pay.

You need to understand that it is big reason we have Apple and Google deep into this, as they collect and sell and provide to the state all your information. With normal cards you need to make more work (like combine information from different card) and lot of it is legally challenging. Also having your smartphone allows company to have location, nearby Wi-Fi and more info also collected, including your eye or fingerprint.

All this information (all items your bough and extra) will be stored indefinitely, linked to all your search, activity while using smartphone and so on. Present AI systems at Google and Apple can guess that you started to use some stuff you bough, link this to your forum posts, chat messages, search requests and so on.

One ex Apple developer told me that it is few clicks of a mouse to see that boyfriend bough to girl (relations are part of AI systems, Apple products have special features for this) vibrator and see all related info that she posted after occasional usage (that Safary tracked). Few more clicks are company can listen and record all this girl do in privacy (of course this never happen with small ordinary guys, but if you are some business and politician or such guy - it will be good leverage).