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Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#91

Post by revelation »

likpok wrote: post #34
trendia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa is working to prevent people from using cash in stores [0]. Currently, they are merely giving merchants an incentive to change, but in the future they may use their immense lobbying power to get preferential legislation enacted. Once cash is gone: 1. your purchases will be available to any company willing to pay for it, and 2. Visa will get a de facto "tax" on all transactions (through 1-2% merchant fees) [0] ht…

NB that handling cash isn't free either. You have to pay someone to count it, secure it, and steal it (you are arguably not intentionally paying people to steal cash, but shrinkage is certainly a cost of doing business in cash). I've seen estimates that the cost of handling cash is actually higher than the interchange fees that Visa charges. This generally counts things like armored truck services, time spent countin…

Well, there is a third even better option, don't charge insane fees to finance ridiculous gimmick programs that for the vast majority of people never have >=1 RoI.

Interchange fees for CC are capped at 0.3% and 0.2% for debit in the EU. No 20 cards in every wallet, black pink yellow variations, no "yes VISA but not MasterCard" sillyness. Honestly even the cap of 0.3% is still far too high.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#92

Post by 0xffff2 »

gbacon wrote: post #33
slobotron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, why should someone's higher risk lifestyle be subsidized by other insurance customers?

This was the insight behind the founding of GEICO, originally the Government Employees Insurance Company. The Goodwins recognized that government employees are more risk averse than the average bear. By writing policies to civil servants only, they could profitably charge lower premiums. Geico began offering policies to the general public in 1974, so this is historical trivia now.

>Geico began offering policies to the general public in 1974, so this is historical trivia now.

I do recall that they offered a rather significant military discount when I was a soldier. I have wonder if that discount was backed by actuarial data. I would rather expect members of the military to be higher risk than civilians or civil servants.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#93

Post by dave5104 »

digi_owl wrote: post #47
Spivak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, how would you like your purchase histories to be used to determine your wealth and companies charge you more for goods and services because they know you can afford to. "I'm sorry sir, our system says your wealth rating is 600, our discounts only apply to people with 400 or lower."

We already see this with how airlines alter the pricing depending on when the ticket is bought and whatsnot (because if it is bought for a middle of the week trip etc, it is likely to be a business trip).

But the key difference is that applies to everyone who wishes to make that purchase, not just particular people.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#94

Post by djrogers »

revelation wrote: post #91
likpok wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NB that handling cash isn't free either. You have to pay someone to count it, secure it, and steal it (you are arguably not intentionally paying people to steal cash, but shrinkage is certainly a cost of doing business in cash). I've seen estimates that the cost of handling cash is actually higher than the interchange fees that Visa charges. This generally counts things like armored truck services, time spent countin…

Well, there is a third even better option, don't charge insane fees to finance ridiculous gimmick programs that for the vast majority of people never have >=1 RoI. Interchange fees for CC are capped at 0.3% and 0.2% for debit in the EU. No 20 cards in every wallet, black pink yellow variations, no "yes VISA but not MasterCard" sillyness. Honestly even the cap of 0.3% is still far too high.

> no "yes VISA but not MasterCard" sillyness.

Is there anywhere that is actually a thing? Very rarely I see a place that won’t take Amex, but no visa or mc?

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#95

Post by snark42 »

djrogers wrote: post #94
revelation wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is a third even better option, don't charge insane fees to finance ridiculous gimmick programs that for the vast majority of people never have >=1 RoI. Interchange fees for CC are capped at 0.3% and 0.2% for debit in the EU. No 20 cards in every wallet, black pink yellow variations, no "yes VISA but not MasterCard" sillyness. Honestly even the cap of 0.3% is still far too high.

> no "yes VISA but not MasterCard" sillyness. Is there anywhere that is actually a thing? Very rarely I see a place that won’t take Amex, but no visa or mc?

> I see a place that won’t take Amex, but no visa or mc?

Lots of places won't take AmEx or Discover (some of the highest fees in the business.)

CostCo currently only takes Visa (no MC.) Sam's used to only take Discover. It's rare, but it happens. In this case it's also only for "credit" purchases, "debit" is ok for any card, but the fees are way less for "debit" than "credit".

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#96

Post by kuschku »

drusepth wrote: post #56
trendia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa is working to prevent people from using cash in stores [0]. Currently, they are merely giving merchants an incentive to change, but in the future they may use their immense lobbying power to get preferential legislation enacted. Once cash is gone: 1. your purchases will be available to any company willing to pay for it, and 2. Visa will get a de facto "tax" on all transactions (through 1-2% merchant fees) [0] ht…

I wish they'd lobby this harder overseas. I moved to Europe 10 months ago and one of my biggest qualms with seemingly almost every single vendor here is that they only take cash and in the rare cases they also take card, they only take some cards (sometimes Visa, sometimes Maestro, sometimes MasterCard, etc). I would give up my purchasing history to everyone in the world if it meant I could use a single card to actua…

Depending on where you are, you might just need to use another type of card.

Many parts of Europe have payment systems that are independent of VISA and MasterCard, but provide similar (but safer and more convenient) functionality, including the German-speaking countries.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#97

Post by kafkaesq »

DannyBee wrote: post #68
belltaco wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if commenters like you added a disclaimer that you work for Google in comments that hand wave away Google's privacy issues.

I've made very clear when i speak for Google and when I don't, and i pretty much never do (except on some licensing issues). If you want official statements from me, go elsewhere. If you want HN to be a place of real discussion and debate, it's stupid to try to tie people to their companies. I think very different from my company on quite a lot of issues, and i happily point that at too. To your point, however, I did…

If you want HN to be a place of real discussion and debate, it's stupid to try to tie people to their companies.

When the company is Google (or of a similar scale) -- and that company claims to care about privacy (but sometimes engages in practices that suggest otherwise) -- then clearly that association is quite relevant. (Its not a huge oversight, but really, if you had put a standard disclaimer at the end of your comment it would have come off a lot more nicely).

But calling people "stupid" for pointing out that this association matters (when it obviously does) is just... "Google-y", I guess.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#98

Post by CobrastanJorji »

jgalt212 wrote: post #39

> To do this, Google said it had obtained access to the credit and debit card records of 70 percent of U.S. consumers. After reading the initial article in May, I called American Express and they swore up and own they don't sell my purchased data. I don't see how you get above 70% without data from American Express. So who's lying?

Amazon Express is, in my experience, by far the most customer-friendly major credit card in the US. There's a reason that I use it whenever possible, and it's the same reason that most places don't accept it.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#99

Post by singron »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #32
cromwellian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually not given to Google in a user identifiable way. I am not privy to the details, but an overview was presented at a crypto conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee7oRsDnNNc&t=10m1s It looks to me like a form of homomorphic encryption where both the aggregate consumer transactions (people bought X at merchant M), and the aggregate Google ad information (people saw ad for X at merchant M) are encrypte…

My question is... how is that supposed to work? How do they turn "person A's credit card account" and "person A's Google account" into something comparable. To say "X customers saw the ad and then purchased it", you've gotta be able to be able to confirm that the same person is on both sides of the dataset, which is a pretty hard problem even without it allegedly not sharing the info on one side with Google. I guess…

I don't know in this case, but there are several identifiers that both parties might have (phone number, email address, billing address, name). In the industry, you can sometimes get "anonymized" data that is keyed by a hash of these identifiers, then you can hash your own identifiers and join to deanonymize. This isn't how it works in this case, but I know other companies do this.

Re: Google’s new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint

#100

Post by vitus »

idlewords wrote: post #88
simlevesque wrote: post #85

WaPo has the same power: they know what customers buy. They're owned by Bezos which owns Amazon. How are they different ? Why would Google's data be more prone to hacking than Amazon's ? This article is pretty hypocritical.

Bezos owns the Washington Post, but as far as I know there's no connection to Amazon or integration with Amazon. He owns it as an individual. Publishers in general have very little visibility into user behavior, since they rely on third-party tracking tools and third-party ad engines.

For about 8 months (Dec 2015 to the end of July 2016) I got daily emails from Amazon with free articles from the Washington Post. Information on this is sparse, so I don't know why it started or stopped.

Prime members also get a free six-month trial period, followed by a discount on a subscription -- $3.99 / month [0], as opposed to the standard $10 / 4 weeks (or $99/year) [1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072MHQFJ1 [1] https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/

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