The other day I posted about an acronym that is set to blind-side a fair number of providers in the video space. I offered a couple of hints about what it was. The last hint was the most obvious – look in your wallet. If you are like most people, you carry a credit card in your wallet. If again, you are like most people, you probably spend money in retail stores and restaurants using that credit card.
What does that have to do with video and what is the acronym already? If you are worried that somehow surveillance cameras are recording you standing at the register with your credit card out and that someone can look at that video, read the info on your card and steal your identity – don’t be. I would wager that even the HD cameras that are out today would not be capable of such a feat. Add to that the fact that the businesses that own the cameras are putting them there for other reasons and would not try that (you just gave said business your credit card, they don’t need a picture of it to get your info!)
The acronym that is likely to blind-side those unprepared in the video industry and the reason video and credit cards are related is a thing called PCI DSS, or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Wiki has a good definition of this term, but I’ll paraphrase by saying that it is a set of standards that companies that take credit cards have to abide by to ensure that they are appropriately protecting their customers’ credit card info. It is driven by Visa and others in the credit card industry and to quote a good technology friend of mine, it is “non-trivial” to achieve PCI DSS certification.
Why is this relevant to video? The obvious guess for those that understand how video systems are being tied to Point of Sale transactions is that somehow the video systems are also capturing credit card data. The quick answer to that hypothesis is no. Most video systems don’t capture any credit card data at all. Another hole in that hypothesis is the fact that even those video systems that aren’t ever connected to the POS system at all are going to run into PCI DSS complications.
I’ll explain why in another post.