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Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

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Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#181

Post by gleenn »

nologic01 wrote: post #153

Imagine you go to a market notorious for haggling and the company that sold you your wallet monitors all your transactions and reports them to whomever of the market sellers pays most. You are now the fat chicken, ready to be plucked: You just bought a hammer, now you need nails. From your social media trail sellers can also infer you are somewhat of a dimwit. Hurry, nails are in high demand in your area. But no worr…

I think the answer is very simple: people don't understand and even if they do then they don't understand that what might seem minor "well whatever, it's just some nails this one time," and it doesn't cross over to the huge power this data yields in aggregate.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#182

Post by Lio »

m463 wrote: post #81
hrudham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number Does this mean you're opting out of the anonymization, but not the collection of personal information? The wording here could definitely be improved.

I suspect the wording is deliberately confusing.

I would says it's almost definitely written to be confusing. See their privacy FAQ also:

> Does Mastercard share transaction data?

> We do not share transaction data without consent or as otherwise legally permitted such as in the context of fraud prevention.

That's a yes or no question. Instead of answering it with a resounding YES they instead reply with some waffle about "legally permitted context".

They also miss out that they sell services that access that data. So an external party might not be able to see it directly but they can pay Mastercard to do the same customer monitoring for them.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#184

Post by squokko »

nologic01 wrote: post #153

Imagine you go to a market notorious for haggling and the company that sold you your wallet monitors all your transactions and reports them to whomever of the market sellers pays most. You are now the fat chicken, ready to be plucked: You just bought a hammer, now you need nails. From your social media trail sellers can also infer you are somewhat of a dimwit. Hurry, nails are in high demand in your area. But no worr…

The average person simply has no hope of understanding the flows of modern global capital, data, weapons, etc.

Back in the day, if the local leather tanner was polluting the town water supply... you'd just go tell him to stop, and if he didn't...

Nowadays the only people who have any idea what's actually going on are the ones who are profiting the most from it and have no incentive to shut it down.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#185

Post by wardedVibe »

nixgeek wrote: post #156
6ak74rfy wrote: post #145

Coincidentally, just earlier today I was looking for one-time-use prepaid cards. I thought I'd buy a few $100 worth cards and use them for pseudo-anonymous transactions. However, all I could find were prepaid "debit cards" (which could be easily tied back to be) our store specific "gift" cards. Curious to see if anyone has a good solution for that? (In the US.)

Privacy.com is very neat for this.

their privacy policies are not great iirc. ironicially.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#186

Post by herbst »

reactordev wrote: post #11
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?

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.

We have alternative real time payment systems that make it very clear that we do not need a fill in replacement for credit cards.

The system we use in Switzerland (Twint) has everything you'd need for barely any fee and real privacy laws, for everything else and over border transactions there is SEPA. There is simply no need for anything else than that.

Nobody is looking to use Google pay or apple pay when we already have a perfectly fine system with way lower fees.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#187

Post by em500 »

BrandonS113 wrote: post #161

One reason to like the visa mastercard duopoly. They work everywhere. I go to the Netherlands a lot for work, and it is a real pain as they have their own payment system, IDEAL, one needs to live there, that is closed to foreigners. Many vendors, especially outside of main tourist areas will not take foreign cards. Guess they don't want to pay 0.1% fees. Yesterday, was left embarrassed in Albert Heijn where they only…

But as you just discovered, they don't work everywhere. Plenty of Dutch and German stores don't accept them. Visa and Mastercard interchange fees are nowadays capped to 0.3% by law, but they used to be 2%+ (and still are in the USA AFAICT), that's why historically Dutch and German retailers shunned them. Why pay 2% to accept a few more cards from foreigners and tourists when 99% of your customers already have a 0.3% fee card (Maestro or VPay)?

Also, the Dutch iDEAL system might form in important building block of a European home-grown payment solution, that hopefully will give the Visa/MC duopoly some actual competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#188

Post by herbst »

figmert wrote: post #26
ssl232 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In Switzerland there is not a single shop I could name that only takes credit cards. Nether offline nor online.

I can name you at least 50 shops that dont take credit card but at least 2 different payment methods.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#189

Post by KirillPanov »

kccqzy wrote: post #148
lxgr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what do they do if you drive off with the car and they have your credit card? Your issuer is only liable for the few hundreds of dollars that the rental car company has authorized; beyond that, it's still their (or their insurance's) loss. The only practical difference is that you're not out that money on your checking account for a few days, which can indeed be inconvenient – but arguably that's not really the…

Couldn't the rental car company keep charging the card and the issuer remains liable for further amounts?

Exactly this.

The issuer can also sell that debt (daily rental up to car value) to a debt collector.

Re: Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

#190

Post by herbst »

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.

People keep claiming this.

I've run a SaaS in the past. About 10% of all US customers were cc fraud, by far the worst rate by country in my data.

I've lost about ~7 dollars on any transaction that went through and then got refunded. I never had any fraud issues with any other payment method.

For me accepting credit card was a pain and costly, but you are telling me for customers this is painless?

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