Now, the internet being a bigger share of retail every year, chip and pin is not an improvement: what we need is 2FA across the board. You have my CC number? Great. Without my 2FA secret, you won't be able to charge me anyway.
This 2FA beats a pin, and would make payment fraud so much smaller, it'd become a minor thing, but good luck finding a bank in the US offering such feature for all charges.
No, that's not quite true. They are moving to chip+pin, but some card issuers are not currently issuing PINs. However the machines themselves fully support chip+pin (and I can confirm this, as most places in the USA now require me to enter a PIN for my card).
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/emv-faq-chip-car...
Mine only does it when the transaction is large, or unusual. I get a call asking me to confirm the transaction. Maybe they ask some other information, I can't remember.
I haven't been to the USA for a while, and most other countries have a working (not new) Chip+PIN system, but I assume magstripe transactions would be considered higher risk too.
In the USA, however, a lot of retailers were still using signatures up until a year or two. It seems to be only in the last year that retailers are starting to move to chip+pin. I think it is simply the large number of credit card terminals, and the cost of upgrading them all.