>>In Norway all credit cards have pictures of the card holder.
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>That's nice but with an increasing amount of card purchases being made electronically the exposure to fraud is still huge. And getting bigger. Thanks to the internet, the bad guys have increasingly sophisticated ways to scam people. It's enough to make you think about going back to doing everything in cash. Not really, but close.

And not only fraud by third parties, but merchants themselves. Few years ago there was a case where a customer had an accident in the grocery - either slipped and fell, or something fell from the top shelf on his head. He tried to sue the grocery. The chain pulled his record and tried to prove he was an alcoholic by simply knowing how many times he bought beer. That's the purpose of the discount card :).

BTW, I have an anonymous card now. My old card wouldn't swipe, so I asked for a new one. I was supposed to fill the form first and then they'd have to process the info... except that I said I forgot my glasses and asked to take the form home to fill and submit later. The cashier said no problem, and swiped the unprocessed card. And it worked. IOW, no processing ever happens - you get the card just to get statistically tallied, and they don't actually need your name. Specially when they have to have the privacy statement and aren't allowed to sell it (and they rather use the data themselves). At least I hope I've saved one tree this way - I'm not getting any junk mail from this grocery.

Of course they could have my complete record whenever they wanted - I'm paying with a debit card, it has my name, and they must keep that on the record for at least a while in case some fraud was going on.