Poonkulali Thangavelu | Bankrate.com (TNS)

By 2027, worldwide e-commerce sales are expected to reach $7.96 billion — an increase of about 61% over e-commerce sales since 2021, according to a 2024 report from eMarketer. As this trend of internet and phone shopping keeps growing, so-called “card-not-present” (CNP) shopping activity (which are transactions where you don’t physically swipe your credit card) continues to grow with it.

Although consumers are becoming more comfortable with these types of transactions, there are still various concerns to consider. For instance, whenever you make a credit card purchase online, certain types of data are stored. But is it safe to give your credit card number over the phone? While it may make it more difficult for a company to store your information, how is that information actually handled?

Phone sales are risky for merchants

Phone and internet sales present more risk for merchants than sales where a card can be physically swiped. In fact, eMarketer expected CNP transactions to account for 73% of all credit card fraud losses (totaling $9.49 billion) in 2023. That’s why merchants pay more in swipe fees to accept card-not-present transactions.

Considering this risk, and also because they can’t see your card, merchants involved in phone transactions are likely to ask you for card details when completing a transaction. For instance, they may want to know:

—Your full credit card number

—Your name as it appears on the card

—The card’s CVV (card verification value) or security code

—The expiration date on the card

—Your billing address with zip code

—Your phone number

They may even ask for information that would be on a driver’s license, such as your date of birth and license number.

In spite of the risks of card-not-present transactions, merchants continue to conduct business over the phone — mainly because it also offers some benefits. For instance, some customers might prefer to conduct business with a human who can answer their questions, while others may not have a physical storefront to conduct business.

Security standards for credit card transactions over the phone

While paying over the phone with a credit card means you won’t physically swipe your card, these purchases differ from in-person and online purchases in other ways, as well. For starters, you are conducting the transaction with a human agent — which leads to some additional security concerns. There is a possibility that the agent could compromise your data, either intentionally or unintentionally, or your data could be intercepted by a third person while you are on the call. That’s why the calls should always be conducted over secure networks.

Major card issuers have set up the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council that maintains a Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) governing how merchants should deal with customers’ card information that they receive. The PCI DSS also lays out how to protect information gathered through phone-based transactions.

The PCI standard says that merchants should not retain your card’s CVV or other sensitive authentication data after use (unless there’s any government regulation that supersedes the PCI standard). Also, whenever possible, they shouldn’t store your full primary account number. If storing your full number is necessary, businesses should not store it without taking adequate protections (such as making sure it cannot be read). They can store other input such as your name and the card’s expiration date.

Guidelines for recordings

The PCI standard says that merchants should not record sensitive details you give them over the phone. If a call is being recorded while you deal with an agent, as it might be for customer service purposes, the recording should be paused while they gather that input. This precaution would prevent any interception by a third party that searches a recording. Another way to prevent recording would be to input the details on the phone’s keypad.

In case the recording cannot be paused while you are providing sensitive card authentication information, the agent should delete the information after the transaction is authorized. If the information cannot be erased, the merchant should have adequate security protections in place to ensure that outsiders cannot search for and retrieve this sensitive information.

For instance, they should only allow essential personnel access to the data and the information should be encrypted or otherwise rendered unreadable.

How to protect yourself

Having your credit card information stolen isn’t just annoying, it can also be dangerous. Although not all instances of credit card fraud can be prevented, here are some tips for keeping your card details safe while making over-the-phone transactions:

—Ensure you’re dealing with a legitimate company. Prior to making a credit card payment over the phone, be sure that you’re dealing with a reputable business. Get recommendations from friends and family, visit the company’s website and read online reviews about the company prior to engaging in a transaction.

—Only provide your card details if you called them. Never make a credit card payment over the phone if a company calls you unexpectedly. Scammers attempt to steal your personal information by calling you and posing as a legitimate business. Once you’re ready to make a purchase, be sure that you call the company directly. Should you receive a call from a company that you’re considering doing business with, ask to call them back on at a phone number that you have confirmed is legitimate.

—Use a credit card when paying over the phone, not a debit card. In general, credit cards offer much better fraud protections than debit cards. Although debit cards offer some protections (depending on when you report the fraud), you will likely still be liable for some — if not all — of the fraudulent charges made on your debit card. Most credit cards offer “zero liability” protection, which makes them safer for payments made over the phone.

—Confirm the amount of the charge and get a confirmation number. Before you get off the line, be sure you double-check how much you’re being charged by the vendor. Write down the amount of the charge and your confirmation number. Store them both in a safe place in case you need it later.

—Monitor your account for fraudulent charges. As always, it’s important that you regularly check your credit card accounts for fraudulent charges. If you see any suspicious activity, be sure to report it to your card issuer immediately.

—Consider using an identity theft protection service. In addition to signing up for account alerts from your issuer, consider using an identity theft protection service. These services monitor your personal information and help protect you from fraudulent activity. Many of them also provide identity theft insurance and other assistance in the event your information is stolen by criminals.

The bottom line

As internet and phone shopping becomes increasingly popular, card-not-present transactions have also grown. Unfortunately, that increases security concerns for consumers, as well.

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So, is it safe to give your credit card number over the phone? The card industry has security standards on how merchants should deal with the information they collect over the phone so that customer security is not compromised. This standard prohibits the storing of authentication data and limits the storing of other card data.

With that in mind, phone calls can be recorded, and your data can be stored if it is essential. Merchants should have adequate protections for stored data in order to stay compliant with the Payment Card Industry standard. In such transactions, it seems you are more at risk from a rogue agent writing down your card details than the safety of your stored data.

(Visit Bankrate online at bankrate.com.)

©2024 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

One of the many things that make seven-time Olympic medalist and 2016 Olympic all-around champion Simone Biles so great is the incredible difficulty of the skills she performs.

Watch the broadcasts of the U.S. Olympic Trials for gymnastics happening at Target Center in Minneapolis this weekend, and it should be obvious even to the casual observer.

Her speed, strength and mental acuity, along with superior technique, make it possible for her to do the skills and do them very well, giving her higher difficulty marks than many others.

But she’s far from alone in pushing that envelope.

Gymnasts in the Elite ranks do harder skills every year, and that rise has been exponential since I competed in the 1976 Olympic Trials in Los Angeles at the age of 14.

Some of this rapid ascent is due to better coaching and better tools to learn skills, such as foam pits and rod floors that save wear and tear on joints.

Specific drills allow a gymnast to break a skill down into multiple parts, learning each part properly before doing the whole thing for the very first time.

Growing up in Dickinson, North Dakota, our gym didn’t have a foam pit.

Trying to learn a double back, for instance, required two coaches standing on either side of the gymnast and “chucking” them around.

In addition, competitive gymnastics equipment itself has evolved dramatically, becoming safer, springier and generally better for the athlete.

Back in the day, competing on vault meant going over a smooth, kind of slippery leather-covered rectangular “horse.”

Today’s vault is a padded “table” with a much wider surface area, covered with a textured material.

This has allowed many more gymnasts to perform the Yurchenko entry to the vault, which is a roundoff onto the springboard, back handspring onto the table, with flips, twists or both afterward.

Biles can do a double pike Yurchenko, flipping twice when others flip once. She’s the only woman to do it, and the vault will be named after her if she performs it successfully at the Olympics.

A safety-zone mat that surrounds the springboard is required for that Yurchenko style of entry and gives an extra measure of safety.

The uneven bars in my day were situated much more closely together, with the supports held to the floor by sandbags or weights.

On wrap-around skills, the base of the bars had a tendency to lift up, which was scary.

In those instances, teammates would sit on the weights to help out.

The bars themselves were a strange oval shape; they gradually became rounder and smaller, and easier to hang onto.

Wearing grips with wooden dowels, like most gymnasts do today, also keeps them more secure while circling around the bar.

Also, the bars are now situated much farther apart, allowing for big swings and release moves between them, and are attached by cables to the floor.

The balance beam, too, has changed. When I first started gymnastics, my dad built me a wooden beam for the backyard, and its edges were quite sharp.

The manufactured beams we used in the gym were obviously better but still made of wood and painful if you came down on them awkwardly.

We wore special socks on our feet and ground them into a wooden box with rosin for a good sticky feel.

Today’s beams are padded and covered in a material that’s a whole lot more comfortable than wood.

It still is only four inches wide, though, and that will probably never change.

As for floor exercise (my favorite), wrestling mats were what we tumbled and danced on first, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t get wiped down after the wrestlers used them.

Eventually, there was a floor system manufactured with vinyl covering, which wasn’t great.

At international meets, we used a floor that was essentially plywood sheets covered with a thin layer of carpet.

It had a small amount of “oomph” to it, but was a far cry from the springy floors of today, which are layered with metal springs, plywood, styrofoam and carpet.

All of these factors have come together to keep gymnasts safer, but also allow for increased difficulty, which is inherently riskier and more dangerous.

Here’s wishing all of the athletes a safe and successful competition at Target Center as they vie for a spot to represent the U.S. at the Olympic Games in Paris later this summer!

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Anna Claire Vollers | (TNS) Stateline.org

For abortion rights supporters in Florida, it was a tumultuous day of highs and lows.

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court paved the way for the state to ban nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. But it also OK’d a ballot measure that would allow Florida voters to overturn the ban this November.

“I was elated and devastated,” said Natasha Sutherland, the communications director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition of state and national organizations that gathered nearly 1 million signatures for a proposed constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion.

“Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant by the time they’re outside of the six-week window for abortion care,” said Sutherland, who lives in Tallahassee. “Considering the stakes are so high with the abortion ban we’re now under, it was really important for us to ensure we gave it all we’ve got.”

This November, voters in as many as nine states could sidestep their legislators and directly decide whether to expand access to abortion through citizen-led ballot initiatives. Constitutional amendments in Colorado, Florida and South Dakota already have qualified for the ballot, while coalitions in Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada are still collecting signatures or awaiting state approval on their measures.

Two more states, Maryland and New York, have abortion rights ballot measures that were referred by their state legislatures, though New York’s is currently tied up in litigation.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the constitutional right to an abortion, kicking the issue back to the states. Fourteen states have outlawed abortion with almost no exceptions, while another seven states ban abortions at or before 18 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization.

Yet access to abortion remains popular, even in conservative states. Since the high court’s 2022 decision, voters in six states have approved abortion access via ballot measure, including in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

“The whole idea of the initiative process is to put pressure on state lawmakers when there appears to be support for an issue that the median voter in the electorate might want but the median lawmaker doesn’t want,” said Daniel Smith, a professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Florida, who has authored books and papers on ballot initiatives.

In several states, Republican lawmakers opposed to abortion rights have tightened signature requirements or raised the percentage of the vote required for ballot initiatives to pass. Proponents of stricter rules say they want to prevent out-of-state interests from manipulating the process by funneling money to initiative campaigns. They say they also want to ensure that populous urban centers don’t have too much power. But in several cases, GOP backers have acknowledged that their goal is to thwart abortion rights measures that are broadly popular.

Mat Staver, an attorney based in Orlando, Florida, said it should be harder to get constitutional amendments passed because organizations from outside the state are funneling money into ballot initiatives such as the ones expanding reproductive rights. Staver is the co-founder of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based nonprofit that opposes abortion-related ballot measures in Florida and other states.

“Even though we have a 60% threshold [in Florida], if you have the financial resources, you can get pretty much anything on the ballot you want,” he said. “That’s not good for Floridians because that doesn’t allow for debate.”

Critics argue that legislators’ attempts to impose new restrictions subvert one of the purest forms of direct democracy available to citizens.

“Democracy requires compromise,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a progressive law and policy nonprofit. “I am concerned that there seems to be a resistance to leaving these issues to the democratic process. Some people in power in these states feel certain issues shouldn’t be up for democratic debate.”

‘Monopoly power’

For decades, legislators on both sides of the political aisle have tried to make it harder for citizens to get various proposals on the ballot, said Smith. It just depends on who’s controlling the state’s levers of power.

“The ballot initiative takes away the monopoly power of lawmakers,” he said. “We can look at restrictions by Republicans right now on the initiative process, but doing so is myopic. It happens on both sides.”

In today’s polarized political climate, voter support for a ballot measure doesn’t necessarily translate into support for a political candidate who backs it. Smith’s research has found that many people may vote for a ballot measure while also voting for candidates from the political party that opposes it.

“And they’re fine with that,” Smith said. “There’s no cognitive dissonance in the voter’s mind. [The ballot measure] is a one-off.”

Ballot measures typically don’t boost voter turnout in presidential election years like they do in midterms and special elections. But 2024 could be different, Smith said, thanks to tepid public enthusiasm for the repeat matchup between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. A ballot measure might prod more people to head to the polls.

‘Not unlike gerrymandering’

Last month, the Missourians for Constitutional Freedom campaign turned in more than twice the likely number of signatures needed for its measure to qualify for Missouri’s ballot in November. The proposed constitutional amendment, like Florida’s, would legalize abortion up to fetal viability— the point at which a fetus can survive outside the uterus, often considered around 24 or 25 weeks of pregnancy.

“The signature-gathering piece of this campaign was the most incredible thing I’ve ever been a part of,” said Mallory Schwarz, executive director at Abortion Action Missouri, one of the organizations participating in the campaign. “I have never seen the level of enthusiasm about the issue that I saw this year.”

Coalition organizations trained more than a thousand volunteers who canvassed in their communities, held house parties, and knocked on tens of thousands of doors in less than three months, Schwarz said, eventually gathering more than 380,000 signatures. The state must now certify the petition for it to appear on the ballot.

Missouri voters of all political stripes have a deep attachment to the ballot initiative process that dates back more than a century, Schwarz said: “We’ve seen issues that may be presented as partisan really appeal to people across the board, year in and year out.”

In recent years, ballot measures in Republican-controlled Missouri have raised the state minimum wage, expanded Medicaid, overturned a so-called right-to-work law and decriminalized cannabis use.

This year, Missouri Republicans put forth several proposals designed to defeat abortion rights initiatives, including one that would require ballot measures to win not just a majority of votes statewide, but also a majority of votes in Missouri’s congressional districts.

After heated debate, the bill passed the Senate, but the House couldn’t reconcile different versions of the bill before the session ended.

“It’s not unlike gerrymandering,” Schwarz said. “The only way they can stop the will of the people is to change the rules of the game.”

Florida lawmakers filed a similar bill last year. They proposed a constitutional amendment to increase the percentage of votes a ballot measure needs to pass, from 60% to a two-thirds supermajority. The bill passed the House but died in the Senate.

In 2023, ballot initiatives in eight states attracted more than $205 million in donations, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks campaign financing and lobbying. Sutherland, with Floridians Protecting Freedom, pointed out that the campaign raised nearly $12 million in April and May, but about 70% of contributions coming from within Florida.

An array of tactics

After abortion rights advocates gathered nearly 500,000 signatures in Ohio to get a reproductive rights amendment on the November 2023 ballot, the Republican secretary of state and the Ohio Ballot Board changed the wording of the amendment’s summary in a way that opponents said was incomplete and inaccurate. Ohio voters approved the ballot measure anyway, enshrining abortion access in the state constitution last November.

A similar scenario unfolded In Missouri, where Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft attempted to change the wording of a proposed abortion rights ballot measure so that it would ask voters whether they were in favor of “dangerous and unregulated abortions until live birth.” A Missouri court later struck down the language.

In Arizona, GOP lawmakers have put their own constitutional amendment on the November 2024 ballot that would require organizers to gather a certain percentage of signatures from every one of Arizona’s 30 legislative districts rather than in the state as a whole. They’ve also considered a strategy to introduce their own abortion-related ballot measures to compete with the abortion rights measure.

If reproductive rights ballot amendments pass, they’ll likely face legal challenges that stretch far beyond the election.

Staver, of the Liberty Counsel, said his organization would investigate legal channels for blocking implementation of Florida’s amendment.

“There may be litigation that would be necessary to argue that preexisting constitutional rights override this amendment,” said Staver, who believes the amendment is overly broad.

Clapman, with the Brennan Center, said she also expects lawmakers to continue pushing back against ballot measures: “It’s not a fight that’s going to go away even if initiatives pass.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.