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Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

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Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#4
This comment is meant to get an interesting conversation instead of "mastercard bad" or whatever.

Would the EFF feel any differently if the data were pseudo-anonymous and open to everyone?

You can go to SteamDB.info and learn a lot about millions of people based on what games they buy. It's a psuedo-anonymous per-user purchase history. Here's mine: https://steamdb.info/calculator/76561197975362423/?cc=us . You can look up basically anyone on Steam, and even do advanced math on all of it. It's been going on for at least a decade.

Have there been consequences or harms? I mean maybe in some isolated case I can imagine it. But there's also lots of value in the data being open.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#5
We should have a payment system that isn't held hostage by two providers anyway.

At least here in Europe MasterCard and visa are the only options. Amex and Discovery are really unusable here.

Besides selling our data this also means we get American morals pushed on us, eg they won't provide payments for some websites they don't like.

But how do you break up such a duopoly?

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#6

This comment is meant to get an interesting conversation instead of "mastercard bad" or whatever. Would the EFF feel any differently if the data were pseudo-anonymous and open to everyone? You can go to SteamDB.info and learn a lot about millions of people based on what games they buy. It's a psuedo-anonymous per-user purchase history. Here's mine: https://steamdb.info/calculator/76561197975362423/?cc=us . You can lo…

Good point. The sticky point is privacy protection. Would you be ok with every single transaction you make being public? Even if so, many would not be.

Selling/sharing depersonalized data is hard to find fault with.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#7

This comment is meant to get an interesting conversation instead of "mastercard bad" or whatever. Would the EFF feel any differently if the data were pseudo-anonymous and open to everyone? You can go to SteamDB.info and learn a lot about millions of people based on what games they buy. It's a psuedo-anonymous per-user purchase history. Here's mine: https://steamdb.info/calculator/76561197975362423/?cc=us . You can lo…

Absolutely not. Pseudo-anoymous can still be traced back with the right correlations.

It should just be illegal to use customer data unless they explicitly agree.

It's not even about harm. It's about having a right to privacy.

And this is not some computer games we're talking about. It's our whole lives.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#9

This comment is meant to get an interesting conversation instead of "mastercard bad" or whatever. Would the EFF feel any differently if the data were pseudo-anonymous and open to everyone? You can go to SteamDB.info and learn a lot about millions of people based on what games they buy. It's a psuedo-anonymous per-user purchase history. Here's mine: https://steamdb.info/calculator/76561197975362423/?cc=us . You can lo…

pseudo-anonymous can be de-anonymized. This would be terrible to be public.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#10
post #5

We should have a payment system that isn't held hostage by two providers anyway. At least here in Europe MasterCard and visa are the only options. Amex and Discovery are really unusable here. Besides selling our data this also means we get American morals pushed on us, eg they won't provide payments for some websites they don't like. But how do you break up such a duopoly?

May I suggest: With Free Software (https://taler.net/)?
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