I too found credit cards scary to begin with, but that was down to my own youthful idiocy. But these days not so much (As I would like to believe I am now more responsible with money than I was at 18).
> I have to get it physically delivered to my snail mail box.
Same here in the UK, however the cards are not delievered "activated", so you have to verify account details to enable to the card so prevents against thieft of the card in the mail (as even if it was stolen from the mail and activated, you will quickly contact the card issuer to say "Hey, where my card?" at which point the issuer will cancel the card and cancel any trasactions made on the card)
> everytime I pull that thing out, someone could photograph or memorize the numbers on it and cause me trouble.
Same could happen with Debit cards too, however the card number alone is useless without the EMV chip for in store transactions here in the UK (Mastercard are even phasing out the magnetic stripe completely[0] - My accounts are set to refuse magnetic stripe transactions unless I enable them via the banks app) and online transactions offer lower fee's if you validate the 3 digits on the back of the card and the address of the card holder, so most online stores will have for all 3 pieces of info (card number, the CVV, and the card holders address) before accepting the transaction. Making it harder to commit the fraud.
My cards (which I recently had replaced as I misplaced my wallet, guess i'm not as responsible as I thought I was) all now have the card number on the back of the card (makes it hard to photograph the card number as the chip and number are onn opposite sides, so when you insert/tap the card into a reader the number is not facing you or anyone standing next to/behind you.
Most of my cards support Apple Pay (The exception is my PayPal Business card which doesn't whoever I don't carry that card with me anyway) So most of the time I'm not getting my cards out of my wallet when I'm purchasing items in store (Prob the reason I misplaced my wallet, Its prob in the house SOMEWHERE...). But granted Apple Pay/Google Pay are not as widely used as the plastic cards shipped from the card issuers are.
Replacing my cards was a piece of cake for me, granted I use more "modern banks" than the high street banks of old, so when I reported my cards as lost my bank issued me a temporary card to my phone so I could still do purchases while I waited for my new card to arrive (Not all banks do this, and the temp card had a max spend limit on it until my new card arrived).
And on top of that the credit card has greater consumer protections than debit cards anyway if something were to happen.
EDIT: I forgot to say. Just because Credit cards have greater protections than Debit cards, that doesn't mean that debits cards have no protection at all.
> I have to get it physically delivered to my snail mail box.
Same here in the UK, however the cards are not delievered "activated", so you have to verify account details to enable to the card so prevents against thieft of the card in the mail (as even if it was stolen from the mail and activated, you will quickly contact the card issuer to say "Hey, where my card?" at which point the issuer will cancel the card and cancel any trasactions made on the card)
> everytime I pull that thing out, someone could photograph or memorize the numbers on it and cause me trouble.
Same could happen with Debit cards too, however the card number alone is useless without the EMV chip for in store transactions here in the UK (Mastercard are even phasing out the magnetic stripe completely[0] - My accounts are set to refuse magnetic stripe transactions unless I enable them via the banks app) and online transactions offer lower fee's if you validate the 3 digits on the back of the card and the address of the card holder, so most online stores will have for all 3 pieces of info (card number, the CVV, and the card holders address) before accepting the transaction. Making it harder to commit the fraud.
My cards (which I recently had replaced as I misplaced my wallet, guess i'm not as responsible as I thought I was) all now have the card number on the back of the card (makes it hard to photograph the card number as the chip and number are onn opposite sides, so when you insert/tap the card into a reader the number is not facing you or anyone standing next to/behind you.
Most of my cards support Apple Pay (The exception is my PayPal Business card which doesn't whoever I don't carry that card with me anyway) So most of the time I'm not getting my cards out of my wallet when I'm purchasing items in store (Prob the reason I misplaced my wallet, Its prob in the house SOMEWHERE...). But granted Apple Pay/Google Pay are not as widely used as the plastic cards shipped from the card issuers are.
Replacing my cards was a piece of cake for me, granted I use more "modern banks" than the high street banks of old, so when I reported my cards as lost my bank issued me a temporary card to my phone so I could still do purchases while I waited for my new card to arrive (Not all banks do this, and the temp card had a max spend limit on it until my new card arrived).
And on top of that the credit card has greater consumer protections than debit cards anyway if something were to happen.
[0]: https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2021/magnetic-s...
EDIT: I forgot to say. Just because Credit cards have greater protections than Debit cards, that doesn't mean that debits cards have no protection at all.