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There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there. My rent is paid through a company called Bilt. I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bil

• andrewfromx 2y ago
  "Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account." https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/29011878427533-Neighborhood-Benefit-Pharmacy https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/2901187842... There's that FSA/HSA benefit section at the bottom which explicitly states that Bilt receives item-level data: https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens
  • gruez 2y ago
    That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.
    • mistrial9 2y ago
      > it's a loyalty program calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..
      • gruez 2y ago
        That's just the standard term for such programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program
        • uoaei 2y ago
          It's the normal term, in that it has been normalized as such. But it is otherwise not accurate except in the barest, most monetaristically self-fulfilling-prophecy way.
      • dietr1ch 2y ago
        So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts, - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track. - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiated pricing is just getting their hands into everyone's pockets.The free market principles rely on perfect knowledge, and every step made to make pricing harder is an attack against self market regulation. Price discrimination is illegal even in Lobby-land, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13
        • barrkel 2y ago
          Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold is more equalized.
          • jkaplowitz 2y ago
            There are ways to adequately approximate that kind of price discrimination without detailed tracking though, like giving discounts to students, seniors, and people receiving various kinds of welfare benefit upon showing proof of status. Yeah it isn’t as accurate as the privacy-invasive kind of tracking, since students and seniors can be wealthy and eligibility for welfare benefits doesn’t always consider assets or gifts from well-off family. But it’s accurate enough to give the economy most of the same benefit without the privacy downside. I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany.
    • jkaplowitz 2y ago
      In Germany, the major cross-merchant loyalty program Payback gives you one or two rounds of extra consent choices about the tracking, and the type we see here is absolutely not mandatory for participating. It does of course let them give you more personalized and useful coupons, but one can participate while declining that permission.
• dylan604 2y ago
  Hopefully exclude? By whom? At some point, somebody has to decide it was sensitive, by what standards? Does Bilt decide to not use it after they were already sold the data? Does the aggregator after already been sold it by the harvesting seller? Does the harvesting app reduce the appeal of their data by deliberately excluding the data? Does the harvesting app care to spend the money on doing that?
• inetknght 2y ago
  > just use cash/certified check from now on You might want to discover about sophistication and pervasive facial recognition technology used by major retailers. Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course.
  • gruez 2y ago
    >Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course. They can already track you through your phone and/or credit cards. Why bother setting up a massive facial recognition system for people paying with cash when they only account for 10% (or whatever) of overall shoppers, and have less disposable income than average?
    • spencerflem 2y ago
      idk why, but they do
      • bdavbdav 2y ago
        Got a source on retailers actively doing this?
        • erikerikson 2y ago
          Word of mouth: retailers in China have been using face recognition technologies to identify key customers so that they can be greater by name when delivered their favorite drink upon entering the premises.
          • gruez 2y ago
            The trouble with "word of mouth" is that you can't tell whether something is actually real, or vaporware that some account executive dreamed up to close a deal.
            • 2y ago
• curiousthought 2y ago
  This is called Level 3 data, and any merchant can choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay. Here's a small comment thread from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213632
  • uoaei 2y ago
    Is there any documentation on this to read further? I.e. what the different levels contain and how much on average is the cost reduction for the merchant.
    • devmor 2y ago
      Here is implementation documentation from Mastercard about l3: https://na-gateway.mastercard.com/api/documentation/integrationGuidelines/supportedFeatures/pickAdditionalFunctionality/levelIIAndIIIData/index.html?locale=en_US https://na-gateway.mastercard.com/api/documentation/integrat... The cost reduction is very small, it’s applied to interchange fees. I’ve been directly responsible for implementing this functionality on payment gateways for multiple processors because it helps reduce fraud holds as well.
      • uoaei 2y ago
        Separate question, what are your ethics around the surveillance of Americans' economic activities by private actors? What "rights" are relevant in this space and which do you subscribe to? I'm not going to debate you about anything, I just don't get the chance to ask insiders any of these questions.
        • chgs 2y ago
          Do you think there are different ethical concerns when dealing with non Americans?
          • actionfromafar 2y ago
• nicbou 2y ago
  Things like that are on my mind when HN rants about GDPR. Something like this would be wildly illegal where I live.
  • DoubleGlazing 2y ago
    Unfortunately the GDPR is largely toothless if a company without an EU presence chooses to ignore it. I live in Ireland and my data is in the databases of several US data brokers. Thise conpanies can't be forced to to comply with the GDPR because they simply do not have an EU presence. You don't have to search far to find stories from people people who made complaints to their local Data Protection office about such issues only to be told there's nothing that can be done.
    • nicbou 2y ago
      A common discussion these days is the threat of a foreign app (TikTok) being used by a hostile government to track and influence Americans. From my non-American perspective, the same thing is happening here. I distrust non-EU software by default.
  • kortilla 2y ago
    HN rants about it because it’s not a good solution. It identified a problem but caused an idiotic fallout (cookie banners) and failed to actually put in a framework to enforce that companies aren’t just lying.
    • throw_away32 2y ago
      > failed to actually put in a framework to enforce that companies aren’t just lying. That's not true. I work in an European company and we were contacted by the agency to give a complete list of partners that we use, reasons for why it is justified, which routines we have for deleting old data etc. I guess in theory we could have lied and made up data, but only an idiot would risk lying to the government. Everyone at my company took it seriusly and tried to provide as accurate data as possible. There were also several follow up questions that had to be answered. The mindset of lying to the government to "protect" your employer seems so far fetched. Why should an employee lie to the government? If it turns out that the company was in violation of GDPR the worst case scenario for the company is a fine. If the government finds out you are lying, the employee faces jail time. The trade-off is simply not worth it. Maybe it's easier to lie to the government in some countries, but not in my country. The government agencies actually checks and verifies your claims.
• jay-barronville 2y ago
  I’ve had to deal with Bilt [0]. In case you’re not aware, they have a “feature” called Instant Link that automatically pulls ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data from financial institutions, including your credit card accounts, balances, etc. They apparently do this via a partnership with a company called Method Financial [1]. It’s frankly the most intrusive thing I’ve ever encountered in any software I’ve ever used—I’m not sure how it’s even legal, but this is America where we have no real privacy rights. Instead of giving you the option to opt in for them to get this level of access, they automatically enroll you into it when your account is created, pull your data, and then allow you to “opt out” afterward, which enables them to have access to your personal and sensitive financial data anyway. And since you literally must have an account with them if your building uses their services for rent payments, they’ve effectively rigged the system to force millions of folks to unknowingly give them access to their personal and sensitive financial data. Anyway, in your Bilt privacy settings, there are some options you can disable (including Instant Link), and I recommend that you disable ALL of them, although given the dark practices of this company, I don’t even trust that those settings are actually honored. Side note: Did you know about a company called Method Financial that somehow has real-time access to ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data? Did you know that this company you never heard of that has said access then sells that access to the highest bidder? Do you remember agreeing to any of that anywhere? Yeah, me neither (on all counts)… [0]: https://www.biltrewards.com https://www.biltrewards.com [1]: https://methodfi.com https://methodfi.com
  • inahga 2y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. Luckily I can go back to analog with certified funds to pay rent. I suspect, without evidence, this is due to the relatively strong tenant protections in Chicago.
• jrockway 2y ago
  What's most interesting to me about that is that they are willing to disclose that data to your email provider. Amazon, for example, is pretty cagey about what you've bought when sending emails, probably because they don't want Google to be able to use that information to target ads to you. (Not because they are Good and care about your privacy, but because they think they're going to beat Google at advertising. How's that going?) So yeah, I don't get why they would do this. It gives their advertising competitors valuable data for free, and it pisses off customers by telling them that they're being tracked when they shop at Walgreens. Strange stuff.
  • myself248 2y ago
    Oh, here I thought it was because every time I want to remember info about an order, it forces me back to their platform, rather than simply searching my email like I do for every other item I've ever purchased. (And no, I don't use gmail.)
• crazygringo 2y ago
  I believe that's opt-in. At least it seemed to be when my landlord switched to Bilt. There's a section of your Bilt profile that shows your other credit cards and whether you want them linked. It's pretty freaky to see them listed in the first place. I definitely keep them off. Bilt is ultimately a big points/reward program though, so you might get points for having them connected. I still haven't figured out exactly what Bilt's business plan is, but the main part seems to be trying to get as much financial data on people as possible, and partnering with landlords to do so, and since it's how to pay your rent you can't unenroll completely. (Unless you maybe mail your landlord a paper check?)
  • inahga 2y ago
    It was opt-out for me. Or at least, I was never given informed consent that this data exchange going to take place. The landlord of course makes it _seem_ like you have no other modes of paying rent. The cashier’s check option is buried in the fine print. Dark patterns all around IMO.
  • DerSaidin 2y ago
    It was initially opt in for me, then they made it mandatory. (Sure, I could pay by check but consumer banking technology/US in the US already feels like is is lagging a decade behind other countries without voluntarily going further back. Paying by check every month would be quite inconvenient.) I'd already decided to avoid bilt as much as possible, but reading this thread prompted me to try going a little further. Looking through their privacy policy it talks about what California residents can do under CCPA: https://legal.biltrewards.com/policies https://legal.biltrewards.com/policies > Request to Know... The specific pieces of Personal Information we collected about you. > You have the right to opt-out from having your Personal Information and Sensitive Personal Information sold to third parties. You also have the right to opt-out from having your Personal Information and Sensitive Personal Information shared with third parties for purposes of cross-contextual advertising Might as well give this a go.
• Sparkyte 2y ago
  Preparation H, they should practice some level of sensitivity with such information.
• kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Loyalty cards are one avenue for data brokers to get your purchase history. Credit cards can also sell your purchase data. Currently the only safe-ish way to be anonymous is with cash. That may disappear with pervasive face recognition and cell phone tracking.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• robocat 2y ago
  So paying by cash is the easiest way to generally avoid this? Clearly you can decide not to use Bilt, but maybe you get caught out some other way (bank, ...) - too difficult to track the trackers.
  • RandomBacon 2y ago
    That's what I do, but I assume some stores like Target also track you by Bluetooth, facial recognition, etc, and can correlate any past or future cash purchases if you use your credit card once for maybe a large innocuous purchase.
• random3 2y ago
  I'm assuming you're using your Bilt card when this happens. Your Bilt agreement stipulates how itemized transaction data (level 3 in payment terms, with level 2 being "enriched" with subtotals/tax and merchant information- which is what you typically see with your normal bank) Card networks (Mastercard, VISA) have different fee structures that incentivize more detailed information like level 3 for lower processing fees for merchants - here's more details on levels https://na-gateway.mastercard.com/api/documentation/integrationGuidelines/supportedFeatures/pickAdditionalFunctionality/levelIIAndIIIData/index.html?locale=en_US https://na-gateway.mastercard.com/api/documentation/integrat... https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/5536526023565-What-bank-services-the-Bilt-Mastercard https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/5536526023... Perhaps more interesting in your case is that if you had your card issues in or before 2022, it's likely with Evolve bank which was breached - https://medium.com/@HackLaddy/when-your-bank-doxxes-you-91522d8b66db https://medium.com/@HackLaddy/when-your-bank-doxxes-you-9152...
• Y_Y 2y ago
  If you find the condoms overly sensitive you can try one of the "long lasting" versions.
  • dspillett 2y ago
    Is that my personality or my looks? :-)
• accidbuddy 2y ago
  The best part of every post in the ycombinator is the comments. Always learn a lot. I think another big problem is pharmacies. The amount of data shared with health insurance companies must be huge.
• TheBozzCL 2y ago
  This literally just happened to me last week. I emailed them to ask them how to stop this: > I understand you want to opt out of all points and rewards and not be tracked. > > We're constantly working to make Bilt as rewarding as possible. Currently, we don't have an option to opt out of points or rewards. To prevent your transactions from being tracked, the most effective step is to unlink your card from your Bilt account. > > To unlink the card: > > Go to the Wallet tab > Scroll down to the Your Linked Cards section. > Look for the card you would like to unlink and tap View all benefits. > Click the ellipsis [:] on the top right, then tap Edit > Unlink. Gah, I hate this service and will avoid renting on buildings that use it in the future.
• conductr 2y ago
  What’s most strange to me is why this Bilt company would pay for that data feed and somehow think it provides some value to you. It’s obviously just creepy way of saying we know too much about you
• m463 2y ago
  This happened to me with square (block). I bought furniture, and they used square and required my email address for delivery. And then after that, anywhere I used square to pay for something using the same card, they would email me a receipt. I complained and they played dumb and never did anything. I just stopped using that card with square.
• RockRobotRock 2y ago
  What if landlords could reach their grubby hands into the data firehose their tenants spew out? I can save 5% on some useless shit at X store, you say? Sign me up! Bilt as a concept is the biggest pile of late stage enshittification horse shit I’ve ever seen.