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Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

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Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#31

Post by titzer »

lemax wrote: post #2

From my observations, for data vendors "anonymization" generally just involves replacing a name or credit card number with some other identifier. That's the reality and that's all they are required to do by regulators. People on both sides of the market know and leverage this. There are legitimate use cases that people are after that can only be achieved by having the ability to correlate pseudonymous entities with s…

> generally just involves replacing a name or credit card number with some other identifier.

This is also often the case with location data as well. Spoiler alert: this is absolutely not sufficient to anonymize location data.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#32

Post by wmurmann »

Who do they sell data to ? The phrase 'selling data' always seemed handwavy to me. What products/services can you make from that data ? Forecasting ? Customer tracking ? Wouldn't deanonymization make the service illegal or is that a grey area ?

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#33

Post by eitland »

QUFB wrote: post #16
dropoutcoder wrote: post #4

Yesterday, a fellow customer of one of the big US wireless telecom carriers received a spoofed call from my mobile number. He called me up thinking I had called him, and we started talking, and turns out he’s a Data Broker from the East Coast (I’m on the West Coast). He was very friendly and discussed specifics for how the mobile phone anonymous token works and how it’s supposedly a secure, anonymous arrangement. I d…

SHAKEN/STIR is rolling out very, very, very slowly. Interoperability is poorly defined and carriers seem to be sharing on an ad-hoc basis. Anyone with a prepaid credit card can spoof numbers, make calls for < $0.005/minute, just by running apt-get install asterisk with a minimal configuration.

And for anyone who wonders, here's the Wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#35

Post by dredmorbius »

wmurmann wrote: post #32

Who do they sell data to ? The phrase 'selling data' always seemed handwavy to me. What products/services can you make from that data ? Forecasting ? Customer tracking ? Wouldn't deanonymization make the service illegal or is that a grey area ?

Anyone willing to pay.

Or with the technical chops to exfiltrate.

Banks and marketing organisations are a major customer. So are skip-tracers, collections agencies, and scammers (who can build impressive profiles of gullible marks based on purchasing / spending habits).

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#36

Post by dredmorbius »

Incidentally, this story and practice are a partial refutation of the "if you're not paying for the product, you're the customer" trope. In the sense that very often when you are paying, you're still the product.

All the more so when payment data are detailed and reliable, as in the case of credit- and debit-card spending.

Effectively: if there are no practical limits on data gathering, aggregation, correlation, and sales, you are the product.

There are exceptions to this in both the free and non-free spaces. Much free software, for example, does not turn users into products. And there are cases of paid transactions (often using more anonymous mechanisms such as cash) in which privacy is preserved.

Those are becoming the exceptions however. And barring regulatory and legal changes, with both civil and criminal penalties having teeth, this will not change.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#37

Post by dwild »

alteria wrote: post #13
dwild wrote: post #9

I use Google Opinion Rewards and I feel like some of their questions are meant to see if they can deanonymize identities from credit card data and a few location data point.

They push hard to track in-store visit and purchase attribution [1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6100636?hl=en [2] https://martechtoday.com/deep-dive-online-in-store-attributi...

Oh yeah that can definitely be from Google Ads too, but I remember some question quite surprising. I forgot to install it on my new phone that I got in December, so I don't remember much theses questions, but it's now installed, so I'll see. I know that they asked me for receipts a few time.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#38

Post by rhizome »

allovernow wrote: post #28
rhizome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US learned in 2016 that information is a tool of war. Defending oneself against the encroachment of zero privacy operators is going to have to be fought with information as well. Laws have no teeth, which will continue to be the case indefinitely due to Citizen's United.

>The US learned in 2016 that information is a tool of war Uh, people have understood the usefulness of information and information control for probably hundreds of years - at the very least since the cold war. What do you think the CIA, KGB, CCP have been doing all this time? I swear people just stopped thinking critically when Trump was elected. Things were broken long before 2016.

>What do you think the CIA, KGB, CCP have been doing all this time?

Sorry, information as the field of battle. To wit: the US lost an information war in 2016 and appears now to be occupied.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#39

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

macmichael01 wrote: post #17

And leaked documents will also show how VICE exploits users by exploiting their privacy through ad trackers. Gosh I wonder what could be worst? LOL!! Lets NOT quickly forget how Mr. Joe Biden's presidential campaign has been financed through credit card companies.

>Lets NOT quickly forget how Mr. Joe Biden's presidential campaign has been financed through credit card companies.

[citation needed]

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