TABLE OF CONTENTS Chances are if you picked up this book you already know something about the Payment Card Industry (PCI). This chapter covers everything from the conception of the cardholder protection programs by the individual card brands to the founding of the PCI Security Standards Council. Why? To make sure that you have not been misled and that you use the terminology in the right context. Also, many of the questions people ask have their origins in the history of the program, so it only makes sense that we start at the beginning.
PCI is not a regulation. The term PCI stands for Payment Card Industry. What people are referring to when they say PCI is actually the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS), currently at version 1.1. However, to make things easy, we will continue to use the term PCI to identify the industry regulation.
In general, any company that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data must comply with the PCI. In this book, we are primarily concerned with merchants and service providers. The merchants are pretty easy to identify they are the companies that accept credit cards in exchange for goods or services. However, when it comes to service providers, things get a bit trickier. A service provider is any company that processes, stores, or transmits cardholder data, including companies that provide services to merchants or other service providers.
| Note | The following terms are used throughout this book.
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