Credit card companies use your past history across merchants in risk scoring transactions, yes, and they also pull in data from external sources that are outsid

Credit card companies use your past history across merchants in risk scoring transactions, yes, and they also pull in data from external sources that are outside of their walls to further enrich that data. Anyways -- this is all massively orthogonal to what I originally wrote, which was around Sift being used as a consumer scoring system. I shouldn't have "taken the bait" so that's my bad.