Apple Pay faces the ultimate test in Germany
Four years after its launch in the United States, Apple has launched the smartphone payment service in Germany, putting its reputation for protecting privacy to the test in a market where that right is zealously guarded.
Handelsblatt says the reasons for this lie in the country’s history, but its effects can be found easily: huge numbers of Germans protested the presence of vehicles creating Google Maps Street View and requested the deletion of their houses and streets. In 2011, after having photographed hundreds of kilometers of streets in the country’s 20 main cities, Google decided, in view of the large number of removal requests, to give up.
Something as normal as credit cards are still far from popular in Germany, as any visitor will know: only 19% of payments there are made with plastic, the lowest percentage in the European Union, which contrasts with 50% in Spain, 65% in the United Kingdom or 81% in Denmark. Most Germans continue to use cash for the vast majority of their purchases, and in 2016, a Finance Ministry proposal to limit cash payments to a maximum of €5,000 to limit the amount of undeclared money in circulation or used for financing terrorist activities was met with strong opposition and was withdrawn.
But Apple isn’t just any company. Its defense of privacy as a fundamental right, together with vocal criticism of other companies’ misuse of personal data and its refusal to provide the police with access to its devices, even in terrorism cases, have earned it a reputation around the world as a champion of its customers’ privacy, as a company that insists it has a simple business model based on high-end products and that under no circumstances monetizes its customers’ information, read their emails or builds profiles based on navigation habits to sell to advertisers. In the case of Apple Pay, the company reiterates that it does not hold users’ transaction information, insisting that such data remain a matter between the user, the retailer, the developer and their bank or card issuer.
Will that steely reputation and those guarantees be enough to win Germans over to Apple Pay? The company probably won’t reveal any details, or simply that take up won’t really prove anything. In the United States, it is estimated that around 10% of adults between 18 and 35 have used Apple Pay in stores and 15% have done so for online purchases. However, iPhone in Germany is only 16.2%, compared to 44.5% in the United States, meaning that cultural issues could turn the launch in Germany in a relative failure — in a market that, on the other hand, the brand simply cannot afford to ignore. That said, young people have higher adoption rates of smartphone payment, which may also prove to the case in Germany.
In the balancing between convenience and privacy, Apple seems to want to position itself as the company that isn’t forcing you to choose one way or the other, and isn’t going to harvest or market your data. Will that be enough to convince a reasonably significant percentage of German users to lower their guard?
(En español, aquí)
