People looking to walk into an Apple retailer and buy an iPhone with cash will be out of luck...

People looking to walk into an Apple retailer and buy an iPhone with cash will be out of luck. The company is now accepting only credit or debit card payments for the devices so that it can track who purchases the phone, according to an employee at the Apple Store in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. The new policy is Apple’s attempt to prevent people from purchasing and then unlocking and reselling iPhones, a situation that has been a problem for the company. Apple won’t let anyone without a credit card or debit card in their name purchase iPhones, according to an unidentified Apple Store employee in a phone interview.The part about “tracking who purchases the phone” really caught my eye. When Radio Shack, Micro Center, or some other merchant asks(ed) for my personal data, it’s not as much about giving them the information as it is about what they plan to do with it. If for example, the cashier said, “Hey, where ya from?,” I’d be happy to tell him/her. But, when the data is being programmatically absorbed into some database, that’s when I begin to envision all sorts of dasterdly usage scenarios. But tracking in the context of the iPhone unlocking debacle (which the IW story says is costing Apple millions)? Suddenly, Micro Center isn’t looking so bad.Unfortunately, the IW story doesn’t contemplate Apple’s rationale for this so called tracking and what might happen should a phone connected with a credit card end up unlocked or in the hands of someone other than the original buyer. What makes this even worse is Apple’s complete lack of transparency regarding such an unorthodox policy. Nothing about Apple’s credit/debit card requirement has been published by the company and the InfoWorld report says the following: Apple’s public relations team did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the new policy.

» Apple, hackenomics, and the waning anonymity (and obsolescense) of cash | Berlind’s Testbed | ZDNet.com

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