Plaid is the most terrifying company in SV. The fact so many people are comfortable sharing their online banking creds with a third party, and in turn authorizing Plaid to share years of transaction data, your balances, emails, phone numbers, addresses etc scraped from your bank account is insane.
Credit cards have a privacy problem
71–80 of 178 posts
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#72Headline not proven. He claimed to do an experiment and didn't find any security hole or any real results, but then blathered on about what might have happened. I can read privacy policies and make up scenarios and so can you, but so what? And more generally, credit cards have been around a long time. Shouldn't there be more evidence by now if anyone is being harmed by sharing data about consumer purchases?
Every single purchase line by line is recorded by many companies. And the security is absolutely terrible over all. If you don't care if your spending habits are shared that is fine. I don't want my data hacked further
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#73Headline not proven. He claimed to do an experiment and didn't find any security hole or any real results, but then blathered on about what might have happened. I can read privacy policies and make up scenarios and so can you, but so what? And more generally, credit cards have been around a long time. Shouldn't there be more evidence by now if anyone is being harmed by sharing data about consumer purchases?
Credit cards work a little different in Denmark because we have a national debit card called the Dankort which allows for cheap credit and can be combined with other cards like visa or MasterCard.
Anyway, some years ago banks opened for the possibility to get your receipts electronically. I opted into that, not thinking about privacy at the time, and they certainly have the data to track us in ways we that make Facebook look harmless, because Facebook doesn’t know your pharmacy purchase history.
I’ve never seen an impact of this that I was aware of, so maybe banks don’t actually use the data. It’s certainly not their business model to sell advertising, but who knows.
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#74>"We don't sell your data, we share it." -all the companies involved Am I the only one thinking there might be some Clapper-level double-speak going on here? Why would these company share admittedly valuable data without being compensated? A question for contract lawyers: can I sell something (say an API or quarterly report) that "incidentally" includes customer data and get away with saying I'm not "selling customer…
Not really but third party processors get a lot of info too. And it's not anonymous. They might share actually anonymous data but it can be picked up for a dime or just easily hacked before dealing with high level Visa or MasterCard level
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#75>"We don't sell your data, we share it." -all the companies involved Am I the only one thinking there might be some Clapper-level double-speak going on here? Why would these company share admittedly valuable data without being compensated? A question for contract lawyers: can I sell something (say an API or quarterly report) that "incidentally" includes customer data and get away with saying I'm not "selling customer…
Your transaction data is never exposed to anyone outside of $corp. $corp provides it's marketing partners with insights gleaned from aggregated transaction data. And allows select partners to query an api for derived information about $corp's cardholders using a marketing identifier that tracks across multiple agencies including credit reporting, social media monitoring and customer intelligence analytics. Additional…
Yes it absolutely is exposed to whomever provided the processing. I've seen the data extensively. The amount of info provided is overwhelming.
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#76I've discovered this problem by finding out that you can sign up for additional cash back on apps like Yelp and Dosh. When you make a purchase these companies will automatically determine whether this purchase is eligible for cash back. I'm guessing they must be buying the data for all my transactions for the purpose of figuring out whether they would give me cash back. It immediately made me suspicious since I'm get…
+1. I’ve often wondered how these cashback services like the ones you mentioned, or, for example, the restaurant ones like aadvantage dining work. Do the affiliates get all your transactions? (I really hope not). Or, do the affiliates have agreements with the cc processors to flag transactions on their side?
There seems to be no non-terrifying answer to this question.
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody said unconditional. You just rotate the cards in your wallet and use whatever 5% category fits your purchase. You might not do this, but there are people who do, and never pay interest. They clearly operate at a loss for the company year after year. I'm asking why their accounts aren't closed.
>* I'm asking why their accounts aren't closed.* Because, churners, are a very small portion of the 20B in revenue Visa generated last year, of which it generated a ~50% profit margin. The system works so well already, why rock the boat by closing the accounts of a few thousand individuals? It would probably cost more to enforce any such rule than they lose in revenue.
> $20B in revenue Visa generated last year, of which it generated a ~50% profit margin.
I was sure this couldn’t be right... but it absolutely is.
https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2018/q4/...
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because for every person who signs up and causes them a loss, there’s dozens of others enticed by the same rewards programs who make them a profit. Credit card companies aren’t having any problems being profitable. I would imagine the number of people who only purchase things that are in the 5% category on their card is extremely small.
> Because for every person who signs up and causes them a loss, there’s dozens of others enticed by the same rewards programs who make them a profit. That's the answer to the question "why are these cards offered at all", which was not my question. My question was, "why are even the accounts of people who consistently cause them a loss still kept open?", which this doesn't answer.
It may simply not be legal for them to decide to drop customers just because they are, taken individually, unprofitable.
Think about an all-you-can-eat buffet. Some poor soul is gonna starve themselves so they can splurge and have a "good deal" on a lot of food. Most people will not, and the business would be in trouble otherwise. They still have to serve the patron who's eating a lot, because what kind of buffet would it be if it was "all you can eat, until you're eating so much that we're no longer making enough money"?
Or, some retailers sell items at a very low price, just to get people into the store in hope of them starting to buy more. Nothing stops you from getting into the store, getting the deal on those items and not buying anything else. The store may be losing money on you but they can't stop you from purchasing the item at the advertised price.
People who choose to spend their time and energy chasing deals to hyper-optimize the benefits on their credit card savings are entitled to their savings. Companies (credit cards or otherwise) are just interested in the total outcome of their operations anyway, not on making money off of every single customer. (Besides, even just defining what is a "profitable customer" is a hairy problem.)
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#79Will leave these here, just one small step to help you regain your privacy: * https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do * https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/...
Did anyone else notice Mastercard's easily breakable captcha? It's just unmodified text with the same noise filter added to all codes. Perhaps there's opportunity here for someone to be Robinhood here and improve the privacy of a lot of people...
Good spot. That system seems very clunky.
Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
A neat little hack with some cards can make it effectively almost across-the-board. Some rewards cards let you select "online shopping" as your high rewards category. You can extend that to in-store shopping at Walmart by enrolling that card in Walmart Pay and then paying in-store via that. For a lot of people, "online shopping" and Walmart together will cover 95+% of their credit card use.
Are there any of those that are 5%? If so I’m very interested.
BofA has a card that is 3% in your selected category, which can be boosted to 5.25% if you have a large enough total in your accounts at BofA and Merrill Lynch.
The base card is 3% in your selected category (online shopping; gas; dinning; travel; drug stores; or home improvement and furnishing), 2% in grocery and wholesale clubs, 1% everything else. The 3% and 2% are limited to $2500 per quarter.
The base rate is multiplied by 1.25, 1.5, or 1.75 if your total at BofA and Merrill Lynch is at least $20k, $50k, or $100k, respectively.