The answer is obvious, the merchants should stop accepting those nasty credit cards..... Oh, wait, merchants take credit cards because they all know that a customer will probably spend 20-30% MORE in their store if they can pay by plastic instead of cash.

The simple fact is that security will not be improved because everyone is willing to allow it to go on as it is - and nobody will do anything to attempt to improve security if it might cost them business..... and, so far, nobody has figured out how to improve security without inconveniencing the customer, even a little bit, or making them nervous.

Personally, I think that it should be possible to educate the customer to understand that the inconvenience "is a good thing" and serves a purpose... but this seems very difficult to do. When CitiBank offered the option of putting your picture on your credit card to make it more secure, very few people did it. WAMU (when they were Aria) started to test out a smart card system - it was discontinued before even being put into widespread use - presumably because nobody was willing to install and use the FREE card readers it required.

Now PayPal is offering the use of Verisign hardware token security - which is a good improvement in security and everyone SHOULD be happy to use - for a token (sic) ONE TIME cost of $5 for the device - I wonder how many people have signed up....