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Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

marketingreportoptout.visa.com

121–130 of 253 posts

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#121
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or is the wording hugely misleading? > To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number What we're opting out from is the use of the data, right? I guess the charitable interpretation is that this was written by somebody incompetent, not by someone trying to be deliberately obfuscatory...

Its the banking industry: it is intentionally misleading/ They've gotten in trouble for it a number of times and even when the Obama administration cracked down on it, they eventually learned how to legally make their fine print incomprehensible again after a few years.

This post contains some strong statements. Some are likely not verifiable here ("it is intentionally misleading"), but others ("the Obama administration cracked down on it") deserve sources, even if well attested -- they're not common knowledge.

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#122

It should be illegal for this to use an opt-out approach rather than opt-in. If it's my data, you should be legally required to pay me to use it, at the price I demand, or not use it at all. Only with my consent, and not at the threat of not receiving service should I decline.

I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, often downvotes equals flagging and not displaying a comment on HN like this at all. Unfortunately I've found much of the HN community to be on the darkside of tech, or at least the side that will create 1000+ accounts to submit, like, etc to manipulate the discourse in whatever way benefits them most.

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checked and the Mastercard one someone posted below doesn't seem to be vulnerable to this. My real card number and a dummy mastercard number with valid prefix and check digit both returned a 200 OK in around 1.01s. A random 16digit number without valid check digit returned 400 Bad Request in about 800ms. Decided to check that one since they have a completely useless machine-readable catchpa. For Visa it was 835ms for…

100ms is /massive/ for a timing delta but you really need a lot of samples. I have exploited timing deltas that were not much more than a handful of machine code instructions in terms of execution time. But you really do need a lot of samples to confirm small deltas. It starts getting impractical for many APIs (someone will notice, hopefully).

> someone will notice, hopefully

Or more likely "someone will notice, eventually"

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#125
Why does the cert say Cloudflare and not Visa?

It says "Verified by: Cloudflare, Inc." AND Organization is also Cloudflare, Inc.

Shouldn't the Organization be Visa?

How do I know that this is Visa?

Genuinely curious since I've not seen certs like this..

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#126
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your credit card mostly on gets merchant name and total purchase value, so the uses are fairly niche. It’s more likely merchants themselves indirectly selling your purchase data. You can sometimes click the small blue triangle in the corner of an ad (called adchoices) to see how it was targeted.

One hundred percent of the time when I've clicked that button, it says "XYZCorp is advertising to people located in the United States", even when the ad is clearly more targeted than that.

Ah, I wish it was better than that.

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#127
post #103
post #58

Sometimes I wonder how certain deals show up as website advertisements and recommendations. Certain blog posts or forum posts appear magically in my search result knowing what I was planning for. Deals and YouTube recommendations also seemed coincidental. Now I know that my debit card has been also leaking my purchase patterns and location. I better add more hosts to my Raspberry Pi-Hole.

Your credit card mostly on gets merchant name and total purchase value, so the uses are fairly niche. It’s more likely merchants themselves indirectly selling your purchase data. You can sometimes click the small blue triangle in the corner of an ad (called adchoices) to see how it was targeted.

If I recall correctly, when I worked on ecommerce payment processing several years ago, the payment processor got a full itemized list for each transaction. Another comment here mentioned airport codes for airfares (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25577366).

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#128
post #125

Why does the cert say Cloudflare and not Visa? It says "Verified by: Cloudflare, Inc." AND Organization is also Cloudflare, Inc. Shouldn't the Organization be Visa? How do I know that this is Visa? Genuinely curious since I've not seen certs like this..

I believe it is the standard free level, "Universal SSL" cert that Cloudflare will provide sites on free tier, if they opt for proxying through Cloudflare.

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#129
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the banking industry: it is intentionally misleading/ They've gotten in trouble for it a number of times and even when the Obama administration cracked down on it, they eventually learned how to legally make their fine print incomprehensible again after a few years.

This post contains some strong statements. Some are likely not verifiable here (" it is intentionally misleading "), but others (" the Obama administration cracked down on it ") deserve sources, even if well attested -- they're not common knowledge.

That's a good point, those contain assumptions that need some backing up because they might not hold up water, even if it's the common perception in politics of American culture.

But otherwise it probably comes down to occams razor and they had some random corporate web guy half-ass the copy on the website which they aren't investing any sort of high quality resources.

It's easy to mistake poor workmanship or miss information as some sort of purposeful evasion.

Hell, another scenario is the lawyers gave it a run by an neutered the text in an effort to make it non-liable and no-one decided to make it readable again.

Not that I like defending these monopolies. Just some better understanding of how things like this work IRL over the years.

Re: Visa Advertising Solutions (VAS) Opt Out

#130
post #34
post #5

What processing companies are available to use that don't sell your transaction data by default?

> What processing companies are available to use that don't sell your transaction data by default? Thankfully merchants are generally opaque in terms of the metadata provided to the payment processors. I for one am thankful my card statements have "Amazon purchase" instead of the specific item purchased, for instance.

There may be more data associated with your transaction than just what you see on the statement.
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