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Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

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Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#51

Post by nicoburns »

mminer237 wrote: post #33
wkat4242 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not every anonymization can be undone. It depends on how it's done. And customers already explicitly agree. They just don't read the terms when they sign up or value having a credit card more than that level of privacy.

It's not like people have a choice. At least where I live a lot of places don't take cash anymore.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#52

Post by wolverine876 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23
wkat4242 wrote: 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?

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…

Don't FedNow payments come directly from your bank account, like a debit card? Credit charges have the advantage of protecting you from fraud - the money is still in your hands; you don't have to fight to get it back.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#54

Post by wolverine876 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #12
reactordev wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

Well the whole credit/lending part isn't even needed. In Europe this is only a marginal thing and most people just have debit cards.

There are advantages to credit. For example, the money remains in your hands until you pay your credit card bill, so if there is a dispute, fraud, or overcharge, you don't have to fight and wait to get your money back.

Also, some businesses, such as car rental companies, won't provide services to debit card holders.

Also, it's a free [edit: zero-interest, not free] loan (if you pay credit card bills in full); you get some small marginal revenue from the money you keep for up to a month.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#55

Post by jadayesnaamsi »

jadayesnaamsi wrote: post #45
wkat4242 wrote: 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?

The EU has something on the way called EPI for European Payment Initiative: https://www.epicompany.eu/ https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/news/html/ecb.mipnews23...

I forgot to update myself actually. Last month, they chose a brand name for the service: Wero.[0]

Here [1], it says:

> strong potential for "wero" to emerge as the leading wallet for the digital euro central bank digital currency (CBDC)

Great, but I am not sure about its potential to safeguard our privacy. One can hope maybe they wont sell our data to commercial entities.

[0]: https://www.epicompany.eu/european-payments-initiative-selec...

[1]: https://payments1connectingthedots.substack.com/p/new-kid-on...

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#56

Post by saiyt »

wkat4242 wrote: post #7
doctorpangloss wrote: post #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 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.

Ad Tech measurement companies can absolutely attribute purchase behavior back to a specific individual. Having worked in this space, banks sell data with an "anonymous" ID that's correlated back to an identity graph provided by a company like LiveRamp. Usually this is then used to determine whether a specific individual who viewed a advertisement (as determined by probabalistic (ip address, session id, or similar) or deterministic data (device id, account login) about an individual) has actually been "converted" to make a purchase. These data sets are not "deidentified" or "anonymized" as many of them claim, and "data clean rooms" advertised by many ad tech vendors are a good privacy aid, but are not nearly sufficient to protect vulnerable populations.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#58

Post by toomuchtodo »

wolverine876 wrote: post #52
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't FedNow payments come directly from your bank account, like a debit card? Credit charges have the advantage of protecting you from fraud - the money is still in your hands; you don't have to fight to get it back.

If you want to pay the 3% credit card surcharge for that benefit, you still can (as merchants can both continue to offer credit card rails and surcharge those transactions). If you as a consumer want to avoid that extra cost, instant payments are available. Disputes is not a valid argument for an entire economy to pay a 3% tax to the credit card rails ecosystem imho.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#59

Post by lmm »

the_shivers wrote: post #43
wkat4242 wrote: 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?

This is anecdata, so take it with a grain of salt, but I hear this isn't motivated by morals at all. Instead, people who spend on things like OnlyFans tend to later claim that those charges were fraudulent, expecting to get their money back. If true, it makes sense that Visa/Mastercard might ban this sort of stuff just to avoid the headache.

Nope. If it were just a question of economics they can charge more to get around that. Chargeback rates are high for porn but not the highest category by any means, and the likes of OnlyFans tend to have a lower chargeback rate than the PornHub/Brazzers/etc. of the world.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#60

Post by edmundsauto »

makeitdouble wrote: post #40
BrandonS113 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From the other side of the table, I've worked in companies avoiding Amex support as long as they could, and even after actively obfuscating the support to push the user to use another card. For smaller entities it's a PITA to have to manage a separate additinal contract, and it costs a lot more for the merchant, when virtually nobody only owns an Amex. If you're in europe there are probably other payment means that d…

Otoh, companies chasing the highest dollar value customers or differentiating via service may want to take it. Higher ticket prices, more revenue, despite the aggravations.

It’s almost as if a business needs to decide if it’s mass market or high end. I would only buy certain classes of goods with my AmEx due to how confident I am that Amex customer service has my back.

For example, the Amex platinum card will reimburse you for items the merchant won’t accept as a return. I recently bought an electric screwdriver that sucked, but wasn’t able to make a decision until I’d used it for longer than the merchant return window. I paid with amex and just got it refunded.

As a consumer that has real value.

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