There's an opt-out here: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/vision/corp-responsibility/c...
Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
21–30 of 253 posts
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#22We 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?
> American morals...they won't provide payments for some websites... Never heard of that. What are some examples?
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Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#23We 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?
FedNow instant payments in the US. Already live, just taking time to ramp (already plugged into 108 banks and financial services providers, including JPMC and the US Treasury). What it could look like is India’s UPI. UPI is so detrimental to Mastercard’s India business it complains about it publicly.
In Europe, more aggressive adoption of SEPA instant payments.
TLDR utility priced payment rails provided by a central bank or other neutral clearinghouse, instead of a for profit corporation trying to maximize its skim off of nation state or some fraction of global commerce volume.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/11/mastercard-india-upi-econo...
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/news/html/ecb.mipnews23...
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/ecb.eurosystemretail...
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#24We 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?
You start an EU competing service with the top EU banks and money lenders. You build a bunch of credit card infrastructure. You tie your infrastructure to the merchant systems and get gateways to implement your protocol. Not exactly easy but it’s not impossible. An app based system could probably do it and force ApplePay and GooglePay to use it in those areas. They will if it’s in place.
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#25This 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…
No, they’re taking a clip of every sale and if I want to pay by card (which is increasingly becoming the only medium) I must choose them or VISA who I assume are just as bad.
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#26We 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?
> But how do you break up such a duopoly? Start buying things with cash again.
Yes! Let's ignore the fact that more and more companies do not take money at all. Problem solved.
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You start an EU competing service with the top EU banks and money lenders. You build a bunch of credit card infrastructure. You tie your infrastructure to the merchant systems and get gateways to implement your protocol. Not exactly easy but it’s not impossible. An app based system could probably do it and force ApplePay and GooglePay to use it in those areas. They will if it’s in place.
It has been tried * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_(debit_card) * https://www.reuters.com/technology/europes-planned-rival-vis... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_(credit_card)
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Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#28I wonder how this impacts Apple Card (via GS) and knowing Apple's whole privacy focus
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#29This 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.
Is it objectively true in general that default sharing transaction-level credit card data - in other words, I can see a (pseudo) anonymous "user ID" column in a table of transactions - benefits all of us more than default privacy? In my estimation yes, but this is a complex question.
My point is that the EFF spends no time investigating this in a serious way at all. We live the reality I'm describing with Steam, which is millions of people, it's been going on for a long time, it's conceivable that even broader categories of transaction data may be prisoner-dilemma-style valuable to share. I just wish the EFF would engage with that 1 iota. Otherwise they are just another opinion in a sea of brand-and-celebrity posters.
Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data
#30We 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?
AMEX unusable in Europe? Hardly. I payed for my dentist Friday with it, both supermarket and lunch today, and all Amazon, etc. Some vendors dont take it, but in my European country most places