Apple Pay Cash earns highest marks for security and privacy

The Consumer Reports comparison pitted Apple Pay Cash against Zelle, Square Cash, Venmo and Facebook (via the Messages app), weighing security, privacy, support, and more in the process. After the results were in, Consumer Reports said that Apples overall rating was significantly higher than for the other services.

Apples biggest demerit was the lack of broad availability — the service is iOS and watchOS only and requires relatively new hardware for biometric authentication and secure credential storage. The broad access hit drops Apple Pays score down to a 76, which is still far above the cross platform Venmo, Square Cash and Facebook that earned 69, 64 and 63, respectively.

As non-Apple users are unable to use Apple Pay Cash, Consumer Reports notes Square Cash, Venmo and Facebook were decent performers, though each earned only fair scores when it came to data privacy.

There has been a lot of debate surrounding mobile P2P payments recently, with Venmo taking flak for a general lack of privacy features. While customers can easily turn off the social aspect of Venmo, they often dont and a shocking amount of information can be gleaned from analyzing the public information.

Zelle took quite the hit for its lack of protection against accidental payments. Just typing in a wrong phone number by a single digit can see your money sent to the wrong person, though a Zelle spokesperson said this will be changed in an upcoming update.