is-x-legal payment brazil
Are Brazilian companies allowed to store the first 6 digits of my card number?
<p>I tried buying a bus ticket online from a bus company from Brazil and the payment failed.</p>

<p>However, in the history of payments the failed transaction shows the first 6 and the last 4 digits of my card number:</p>

<pre><code> CARD: 123123******1234
 Operator: VISA
</code></pre>

<p>I am now wondering if they actually store the full information about my card details (e.g. expire date and CVV code).</p>

<p>Is this okay from a legal point of view? Usually I know companies can store the last 4 digits, but have not seen so far storing the first 6 digits.</p>

<p>Yes, they are allowed to store all the digits if they want, as long as this is not made in a way that violates any privacy laws. There isn't an specific law in Brazil about how many credit card digits a company is allowed to store. Many sites will actually offer you the option of saving card data to make it easy for you in the next purchase.</p>
<p>And as per phoog comments, the fact you don't see all the digits somewhere else doesn't mean the company doesn't store them.</p>

<p>They not only may do so, they <strong>have</strong> to:</p>
<p>Without the complete credit card number and some proof that the card was used with them, the payment processor will not order the payment to the transportation agency for the debt you incurred when using their service. This is in the rules of the payment processor. So the transportation agency needs to save your whole card number at least until they have processed the payment fully - as in told the payment processor to make the wire of funds.</p>
<p>The transportation service (and all other companies) print parts of your number onto the receipt so <em>you</em> can make sure from which card you paid what service in case you might have multiple cards, or in case you want to dispute the charge on the basis that you had reported the card of that number stolen/lost before the card was used.</p>

<p>I don't know about a legal point of view, but storing the PAN (credit card number) is a violation of Visa policies. However, the first six digits of your credit card is known as the BIN, and is issued to the bank that issued your credit card. Visa assigned this sequence of numbers to the bank as sort of an &quot;account number&quot;, and the bank then uses those numbers as the first six digits for all the credit cards they issue under this account, so anyone who knows under what account your credit card was issued knows those numbers. So it's not all that secret of information. For instance, you give &quot;123123&quot; as being these first six numbers, but I happen to know that actually the first of these digits is 4.</p>
