Are any words in the English language more abused than ‘for your convenience’? As soon as you read them you know that it’s not your convenience an organisation has in mind, but its own.

Last week, my bank sent me a contactless debit card. If you don’t have one yet, the chances are you soon will have.

It looks like any other credit or debit card, but contains a tiny radio receiver which - when it is waved within a couple of inches of a ticket machine or terminal at a shop checkout - can be used to make a payment.

An experiment by Which? magazine last week demonstrated how thieves can exploit the technology to skim enough information from our cards to make large purchases without us even being aware of it (file picture)

I didn’t ask for it; there was no mention of me being able to stick with a non-contactless, old-style card.

But my bank’s attitude was how could I possibly want to turn down an invention it describes as ‘the even faster way to pay for everyday items’?

How many seconds does it take to key in a PIN, for goodness sake?

There are plenty of ways I wish my day-to-day life could be made more efficient: I wish the council would remove the bus lanes that jam the traffic into my nearest town; I would love it if it didn’t take five minutes to boot-up my computer; or if I could find an electrician who could come at the drop of hat, rather than leaving me waiting in the dark for several hours.

But it has never crossed my mind that I have been wasting valuable seconds by having to press four buttons each time I buy something with my debit card. The very idea that we can save a useful amount of time by being able to wave a card at a machine instead of entering a PIN is absurd.

The reality is that it isn’t my life that will be made easier thanks to my new contactless card, it is the lives of criminal gangs wanting to steal from my account.

An experiment by Which? magazine last week demonstrated how thieves can exploit the technology to skim enough information from our cards to make large purchases without us even being aware of it.

Notionally, the biggest single transaction a thief can make on your contactless card if you lose it is £20 - the automatic limit placed on contactless purchases, which is set to rise to £30 in September. Yet the Which? researchers managed to buy a £3,000 TV set using one of the cards.

Notionally, the biggest single transaction a thief can make on your contactless card if you lose it is £20 - the automatic limit placed on contactless purchases

They didn’t even have to steal the card. All they needed was a standard card scanner — the type you’d use in a shop — which they bought online.

Placing this so that the wallet of an oblivious passer-by would come within a few centimetres of it, they were able to collect enough data from the card — the cardholder’s name and card number — to use it to make a hefty online purchase.

Many websites demand another security measure — the three- digit security code on the back of the card — but not all.

The UK Cards Association, a trade body for card issuers, claims security fears around contactless cards are overblown. In 2014, it says that £2.3 billion was spent using contactless cards, of which only £153,000 was fraudulent.

What makes contactless cards particularly worrying is that they give thieves immediate access to potentially thousands of pounds in your account

At less than a penny for every £100 spent, the rate of contactless fraud is one tenth of that for credit and debit cards as a whole — though that is bound to rise as criminals get to grips with the possibilities.

‘Consumers are fully protected against any fraud losses on contactless cards and will never be left out of pocket,’ says Richard Koch, the association’s head of policy.

Yet, as people who have tried to reclaim losses on credit cards have discovered, banks and card issuers will often try to wriggle out of reimbursing victims.

They may, for example, decide the customer has been ‘negligent’ in writing down a PIN as a memory prompt or in delaying reporting the loss of their card.

What makes contactless cards particularly worrying is that they give thieves immediate access to potentially thousands of pounds in your account.

Will we soon be held responsible if, say, a bank argues that we have left too much money in our current account?

In any case, fraud isn’t the only problem. Some contactless card users have reported that they inadvertently paid for something even when their cards were tucked away in their wallets.

For as soon as you activate a contactless card, you are effectively walking around with a small radio transmitter in your pocket, constantly trying to hook up with a till to hand over your money.

When Marks & Spencer introduced contactless payment terminals in its shops last year, it was bombarded with complaints from customers who had been charged twice for items.

When Marks & Spencer introduced contactless payment terminals in its shops last year, it was bombarded with complaints from customers who had been charged twice for items

Their contactless cards had been read by a terminal and money deducted from their accounts even though they had paid by another method.

Transport for London, too, was inundated with complaints when it started to allow payments from contactless cards on trains and buses last year. The cards clashed with the Oyster cards carried in the same wallet.

In the worst cases, passengers found the ticket barrier had charged their Oyster cards when they began their journeys and their contactless cards when they ended them — meaning they were charged two maximum fares, turning a £3 journey, for instance, into a £18 one.

So, why is this happening? Contactless cards are supposed to work at a distance of up to two inches, yet the National Consumer Federation found some could be read from six to eight inches away.

Never mind running into problems at ticket barriers, that could be enough to pay for someone else’s sandwich as you walk close to a checkout. You wouldn’t even know you’d done so until your credit card bill or bank statement arrived — and even then you might well not notice.

And, of course, any errors are never in the cardholder’s favour. Contactless cards mean the retail industry will cash in on our struggle to keep track of our expenditure and, even if we do realise we have been inadvertently charged, on our inertia to do anything about it.

Following the litany of complaints, users are now told to take their contactless cards out of their wallet when they pay — never tapping their entire wallet in case they swipe other cards, too.

We are also advised to use a protective cardholder with a thin layer of foil that screens the contactless card to prevent unwanted transactions.

But what a lot of fuss when we could simply carry on using chip and PIN!

Despite the security flaws, however, banks are extremely keen to get us to use contactless cards. At the end of 2014, 58 million of them had been issued, a 52 per cent increase on the year before.

Many customers have been told a contactless version is the only option

Within a couple of years, virtually all of us will be sent one as our old cards expire. Indeed, some banks are so keen that they are sending them months or even years before then.

The reason for this keenness can be found on the website of the UK Cards Association. Trying to encourage retailers to install contactless machines, the body explains ‘transaction data could provide an insight into customer behaviour, to feed into business decisions and sales strategies’.

In other words, the cards are being used to collect data on our spending habits.

For years, card issuers and retailers have been doing this through our credit and debit cards. Not only do they use the data themselves, they sell it on to marketing intelligence companies, which sell the information to other retailers.

If I buy a widescreen TV on my credit card, the information would go towards creating a picture of the type of consumers who live on my street.

This postcode-related information is used to target us with junk mail and cold calls, and even inform fast food companies of the potentially most profitable sites.

The trouble is that a quarter of the money we spend in shops is in the form of cash.

If we hand over a pound for a fizzy drink, we are anonymous — there is no way the marketing industry can collect and use that information to bombard us with adverts.

While marketers insist the data is ‘anonymised’, as contactless cards become the norm it will allow the industry to effectively track us around town as we take the bus, buy a coffee and visit the gym. I don’t see why I should play along with their game.

Fortunately, when I contacted my bank it did agree to send me a non-contactless card — but many customers have been told a contactless version is the only option.