Well the other problem in America is the payment rails are very primitive. How does your credit card company know which items you’re buying, when the payment de

Well the other problem in America is the payment rails are very primitive. How does your credit card company know which items you’re buying, when the payment description will be something cryptic that you can only sometimes even match to the store name and that’s it. It’s not like your credit card company gets an itemized receipt of your purchases. I’ve actually worked at a company that was purchasing this data from banks, it was all anonymized and we were looking for trends. Maybe there are other companies that are able to buy the pii data and use it for marketing, but I think there are better, simpler sources. The stores/brands themselves can sell the data about their customers, or they are passing it to google to run targeted ads on their own customers and then google now has that data too and can use it for other things, etc.