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Your only option is to refuse cards altogether because they've all been selling anonymized data on you for years. The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direc

Your only option is to refuse cards altogether because they've all been selling anonymized data on you for years. The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies.

bigiain 8y ago
"anonymized" 100% deserves/needs scare quotes around that. I mean just look at the snake-oil bullshit wording Google are using to describe what they do here: "Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,” I mean, I guess there are proper cryptographic means by which you could achieve something that matches that description. But does _anyone_ trust the worlds biggest advertising company to be doing that???
- spydum 8y ago
  Out of all the other possible parties that could have attempted this? Yup, I'd say I trust them the most.
  - taneq 8y ago
    What Google can do and what they choose to do are two different things.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    I don't doubt one bit that they have people capable and probably even willing to get the crypto right. I _strongly_ doubt they have the corporate will or motivation to actually put it into production. I'd go so far as to say "getting it right" is antithetical to their (enormously profitable and deeply entrenched) business model.
    - spydum 8y ago
      I don't know about that. Measuring ad impact is extremely valuable. What is interesting to me is the obvious bias of being the seller of ads as well as the impact measurement provider.. fox guarding the henhouse and all
    - tdb7893 8y ago
      If they sold it to Mastercard as double blind I personally would trust them on it. Lying to consumers seems to turn out fine but lying to large corporations I would bet gets expensive and my experience is that a large org will bend over backwards to meet the letter (if not the spirit) of what they say.
- dgzl 8y ago
  What you're probably worried about is an entity being able to fingerprint you based on a few simple data points and a profile of someone who fits those data points. Which is possible, and increasingly accurate.
- xapata 8y ago
  Yes, I do trust them. They don't need PII to get value from this.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  "Anonymized" always deserves scare quotes, because there ain't such thing as "anonymized"; there's only "anonymized until correlated with other data sets". Anyway. Yes, I do trust that of all parties, Google actually would both develop and deploy whatever that "double-blind encryption technology" is. Still, it's not the problem. I think we need to stop dancing around the real issue with all that talk about PII. No, I really don't care about my PII just leaking somewhere. I care about what people do with them. It's what companies do with PII, "anonymized" or not, that's the problem. Advertising, upselling, price discrimination. Those are the real problems.
- fosco 8y ago
  having sat during conversations at a large credit card company it turns out 4 to 5 transactions are all that is needed to identify a person. meta data like where you made purchases when you made purchases and how much you spent and maybe a few other details are all you need 4 or 5 times to de-anonymize full disclosure... I have 3 credit cards from this company....at this point I cannot imagine writing checks and carrying cash for daily use... I am not sure this battle can be won at this point.
i1856511 8y ago
A lot of attention in the press is given to Google et. al. about purchase profiling and tracking for ads. But the concept of purchase profiling has existed really since the invention of the credit card. As others have mentioned hedge funds have brokered this data for decades - but for some reason it has not been covered as excruciatingly as it has for tech companies. While I disapprove of the practice overall I would bet that tech companies are actually a more responsible steward (jail warden?) for this data than credit card bureaus, precisely because the spotlight is on them and also we have come a long way for data security in general. There needs to be much more coverage of this in the contemporary press as it is applied to credit card companies, agnostic of tech co.'s making it a joint venture. I believe credit card co.'s gave this process momentum early on and tech co.'s are just taking it and running with it. The same can be said for Google location tracking vs. Verizon's straight-up selling that data as an asset.
- mrep 8y ago
  It is somewhat ironic that Google is probably more privacy focused and has better security than any other company in the fortune 500 and yet they seem to get some of the most negative criticism here.
  - i1856511 8y ago
    Yes it is. Personally, I dislike tracking and don't mind disparaging Google for it - but I think in this case reporting like this manages to miss the heart of the problem and mischaracterize the situation.
  - ehnto 8y ago
    You can be extremely ethical about your factory farm but it's still a factory farm. Google is in the business of utilising your data in the interest of advertising. No matter how you sugar coat it, the core of the business is tracking people and exploiting that data. Are they doing their best to be careful and ethical? It sure seems like it, but that doesn't solve the issue. The free services they and many tech companies provide for free are just payment for your data. The majority of people don't realise this implicit connection and many others do realise it but are happy with the transaction. But it's important to note that they undermine the ability to provide these services more ethically by setting a social norm of incredible services that are "free". Edit: I will add that the cost and benefit to society of this kind of service provision is complex and nuanced, Google has obviously provided incredible value and society has decided that advertising is a fair price to pay, else they wouldn't be around still. But the true effects of immense tracking and advertising are still yet to play out completely.
euske 8y ago
I think you could buy an anonymous prepaid/gift card periodically, though I don't know if there's any restriction that prevents you from buying certain things (probably you can't use it for airline check-in). Wish this kind of things could be done more easily in future.
njarboe 8y ago
Credit cards know how much you spend at Whole Foods with a certain transaction amount. This I always assumed was tracked and could be used/sold by the credit card companies. This article tends to imply that MasterCard is getting the actual list of things that you buy at a store. I would hope that for this to happen the store must also be involved in selling the individual item list to the credit card company. I was hoping that stores were not doing this or I would have heard something about it, but maybe it would not really be news at this point in the data selling game.
gaius 8y ago
The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies They are looking for advance warning of something happening to the merchant, if they are a public company - not on you as an individual.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Other companies are different: Google is unique in the sense that they have - or if they want, they have enough data to build - an extremely rich and complex profile including very intimate details of a given person. There is no other company (or a government agency) that knows exactly where you are, how you spend your time, what your precise interests are, what your fears and hopes are (based on your search history), your relationship network, including secret lovers, and so on. Avoiding being tracked by Google is almost impossible these days, given that everybody uses Gmail, GA, Android and so on.
mpweiher 8y ago
And that's one of the reasons Germans prefer cash. I get products, I give money. The End.
- tomcooks 8y ago
  Where in Germany? I have seen Germans using credit/debit cards for 100% of transactions; cash only seems to be more of a garlic-belt thing.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    Berlin, for example. When there's a card payment for groceries it tends to be tourists.
qubax 8y ago
> The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies. Not just hedge funds. All finance institutions buy ( "share" ) data from and with each other. Even if you "opt out" ( we should be defaulted to opt-in rather than having to opt out but that's another discussion ), banks have a sneaky trick of slightly changing your ToS and giving you 30 days to "opt out" again. It's one of the reasons why every year, people get "new terms" in the mail. If you look closely, you'll see a slip of paper in the pile of papers about "privacy" rights and saying you have 30 days or so to let your bank know you don't want them to "share" your data. Also, keep in mind that anonymized data is anonymous in a local sense, not a global sense. Even if PII is removed from one data vender, you can link anonymized data from a variety of data venders to "unanonymize" you. If you have one set of PII ( say like your employer ), then it's really effortless to link you with the anonymized data. If you have search history from google, data dump from facebook and CC data, then one could pretty much peer into most people's homes and lives without much problem. You could know people better than their spouses do and in many instances, better than they do themselves. The difference between a slave or serf and a free man isn't paid labor ( as even slaves were paid for their labor ), but the right to prevent intrusion into their lives. A free man had privacy. Slaves had no right to privacy. We are moving into a world with little to no privacy. Well not all of us. The wealthy are moving into a world of greater privacy. Buying up islands. Highly walled and heavily guarded compounds. Opaque offshore wealth centers.
sitepodmatt 8y ago
Wait, so for example hedge funds can buy aggregated data from BoA about how much is spent at Walmart on BoA CCs on a daily/weekly basis, wouldn't that data be very valuable prior to an earning call/report, somewhat like insider trading (but I guess not technically?)?

bigiain 8y ago

"anonymized" 100% deserves/needs scare quotes around that. I mean just look at the snake-oil bullshit wording Google are using to describe what they do here: "Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,” I mean, I guess there are proper cryptographic means by which you could achieve something that matches that description. But does _anyone_ trust the worlds biggest advertising company to be doing that???

spydum 8y ago
Out of all the other possible parties that could have attempted this? Yup, I'd say I trust them the most.
- taneq 8y ago
  What Google can do and what they choose to do are two different things.
- bigiain 8y ago
  I don't doubt one bit that they have people capable and probably even willing to get the crypto right. I _strongly_ doubt they have the corporate will or motivation to actually put it into production. I'd go so far as to say "getting it right" is antithetical to their (enormously profitable and deeply entrenched) business model.
  - spydum 8y ago
    I don't know about that. Measuring ad impact is extremely valuable. What is interesting to me is the obvious bias of being the seller of ads as well as the impact measurement provider.. fox guarding the henhouse and all
  - tdb7893 8y ago
    If they sold it to Mastercard as double blind I personally would trust them on it. Lying to consumers seems to turn out fine but lying to large corporations I would bet gets expensive and my experience is that a large org will bend over backwards to meet the letter (if not the spirit) of what they say.
dgzl 8y ago
What you're probably worried about is an entity being able to fingerprint you based on a few simple data points and a profile of someone who fits those data points. Which is possible, and increasingly accurate.
xapata 8y ago
Yes, I do trust them. They don't need PII to get value from this.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
"Anonymized" always deserves scare quotes, because there ain't such thing as "anonymized"; there's only "anonymized until correlated with other data sets". Anyway. Yes, I do trust that of all parties, Google actually would both develop and deploy whatever that "double-blind encryption technology" is. Still, it's not the problem. I think we need to stop dancing around the real issue with all that talk about PII. No, I really don't care about my PII just leaking somewhere. I care about what people do with them. It's what companies do with PII, "anonymized" or not, that's the problem. Advertising, upselling, price discrimination. Those are the real problems.
fosco 8y ago
having sat during conversations at a large credit card company it turns out 4 to 5 transactions are all that is needed to identify a person. meta data like where you made purchases when you made purchases and how much you spent and maybe a few other details are all you need 4 or 5 times to de-anonymize full disclosure... I have 3 credit cards from this company....at this point I cannot imagine writing checks and carrying cash for daily use... I am not sure this battle can be won at this point.

i1856511 8y ago

A lot of attention in the press is given to Google et. al. about purchase profiling and tracking for ads. But the concept of purchase profiling has existed really since the invention of the credit card. As others have mentioned hedge funds have brokered this data for decades - but for some reason it has not been covered as excruciatingly as it has for tech companies. While I disapprove of the practice overall I would bet that tech companies are actually a more responsible steward (jail warden?) for this data than credit card bureaus, precisely because the spotlight is on them and also we have come a long way for data security in general. There needs to be much more coverage of this in the contemporary press as it is applied to credit card companies, agnostic of tech co.'s making it a joint venture. I believe credit card co.'s gave this process momentum early on and tech co.'s are just taking it and running with it. The same can be said for Google location tracking vs. Verizon's straight-up selling that data as an asset.

mrep 8y ago
It is somewhat ironic that Google is probably more privacy focused and has better security than any other company in the fortune 500 and yet they seem to get some of the most negative criticism here.
- i1856511 8y ago
  Yes it is. Personally, I dislike tracking and don't mind disparaging Google for it - but I think in this case reporting like this manages to miss the heart of the problem and mischaracterize the situation.
- ehnto 8y ago
  You can be extremely ethical about your factory farm but it's still a factory farm. Google is in the business of utilising your data in the interest of advertising. No matter how you sugar coat it, the core of the business is tracking people and exploiting that data. Are they doing their best to be careful and ethical? It sure seems like it, but that doesn't solve the issue. The free services they and many tech companies provide for free are just payment for your data. The majority of people don't realise this implicit connection and many others do realise it but are happy with the transaction. But it's important to note that they undermine the ability to provide these services more ethically by setting a social norm of incredible services that are "free". Edit: I will add that the cost and benefit to society of this kind of service provision is complex and nuanced, Google has obviously provided incredible value and society has decided that advertising is a fair price to pay, else they wouldn't be around still. But the true effects of immense tracking and advertising are still yet to play out completely.

euske 8y ago

I think you could buy an anonymous prepaid/gift card periodically, though I don't know if there's any restriction that prevents you from buying certain things (probably you can't use it for airline check-in). Wish this kind of things could be done more easily in future.

njarboe 8y ago

Credit cards know how much you spend at Whole Foods with a certain transaction amount. This I always assumed was tracked and could be used/sold by the credit card companies. This article tends to imply that MasterCard is getting the actual list of things that you buy at a store. I would hope that for this to happen the store must also be involved in selling the individual item list to the credit card company. I was hoping that stores were not doing this or I would have heard something about it, but maybe it would not really be news at this point in the data selling game.

gaius 8y ago

The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies They are looking for advance warning of something happening to the merchant, if they are a public company - not on you as an individual.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

Other companies are different: Google is unique in the sense that they have - or if they want, they have enough data to build - an extremely rich and complex profile including very intimate details of a given person. There is no other company (or a government agency) that knows exactly where you are, how you spend your time, what your precise interests are, what your fears and hopes are (based on your search history), your relationship network, including secret lovers, and so on. Avoiding being tracked by Google is almost impossible these days, given that everybody uses Gmail, GA, Android and so on.

mpweiher 8y ago

And that's one of the reasons Germans prefer cash. I get products, I give money. The End.

tomcooks 8y ago
Where in Germany? I have seen Germans using credit/debit cards for 100% of transactions; cash only seems to be more of a garlic-belt thing.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  Berlin, for example. When there's a card payment for groceries it tends to be tourists.

qubax 8y ago

> The big hedge funds pay big dollars for direct lines of data from the credit card companies. Not just hedge funds. All finance institutions buy ( "share" ) data from and with each other. Even if you "opt out" ( we should be defaulted to opt-in rather than having to opt out but that's another discussion ), banks have a sneaky trick of slightly changing your ToS and giving you 30 days to "opt out" again. It's one of the reasons why every year, people get "new terms" in the mail. If you look closely, you'll see a slip of paper in the pile of papers about "privacy" rights and saying you have 30 days or so to let your bank know you don't want them to "share" your data. Also, keep in mind that anonymized data is anonymous in a local sense, not a global sense. Even if PII is removed from one data vender, you can link anonymized data from a variety of data venders to "unanonymize" you. If you have one set of PII ( say like your employer ), then it's really effortless to link you with the anonymized data. If you have search history from google, data dump from facebook and CC data, then one could pretty much peer into most people's homes and lives without much problem. You could know people better than their spouses do and in many instances, better than they do themselves. The difference between a slave or serf and a free man isn't paid labor ( as even slaves were paid for their labor ), but the right to prevent intrusion into their lives. A free man had privacy. Slaves had no right to privacy. We are moving into a world with little to no privacy. Well not all of us. The wealthy are moving into a world of greater privacy. Buying up islands. Highly walled and heavily guarded compounds. Opaque offshore wealth centers.

sitepodmatt 8y ago

Wait, so for example hedge funds can buy aggregated data from BoA about how much is spent at Walmart on BoA CCs on a daily/weekly basis, wouldn't that data be very valuable prior to an earning call/report, somewhat like insider trading (but I guess not technically?)?