> most people don't want to share their bank account numbers
While far less common these days, people gave this information to arbitrary payees (via personal checks) for decades. The idea that it's not to be given to payers, despite it having been given to arbitrary payees, seems misguided. If someone tries to commit fraud with that number, they're probably going to get caught, making it sufficiently unlikely, no?
When I first came to USA as a tourist in 2011, one of the most amusing thing I witnessed was at a party at my Couch Surfer’s host when a friend of theirs payed back a debt by writing them a check. This cranked me up, as I had not seen a real world check in use since I was a kid in the early 1990s. I was equally surprised to learn how nobody else at the party thought anything of this. Coming from Iceland where you simply transfer them money via a bank app (or a website back then), this was my first American culture shock.
Now I live in the USA and I actually use checks all the time. I get paid via a check, I pay with checks at my local farmstand, I used to pay my rent with a check, my immigration fees were paid with a check etc.
This is orthogonal to the original point. Passing around your checking account number isn’t that big of a security risk. We do it now and banks have built guard rails in place because we do it now.
Checks are easy to use: just write a name and an amount on a piece of paper.
They’re secure: they can only be cashed by the person they’re made out to (unlike cash).
They have theoretically infinite throughput: you can write any amount on a single check.
They have extremely high latency, which is why digital payments are being preferred in many situations. But the remaining situations where checks are used high latency is acceptable or even desirable.
While far less common these days, people gave this information to arbitrary payees (via personal checks) for decades. The idea that it's not to be given to payers, despite it having been given to arbitrary payees, seems misguided. If someone tries to commit fraud with that number, they're probably going to get caught, making it sufficiently unlikely, no?