Direct link to the research paper: ("Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata")
Your shopping habits are uniquely identifiable
21–24 of 24 posts
Re: Your shopping habits are uniquely identifiable
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If your purchase habits are uniquely trackable, upon switching to cash you'd need to modify your purchasing habits sufficiently to disassociate them from your past-self. I do not think that's quite right, at least in this instance. For the study in the article, the use of a single credit card number links purchases together, which is what enables the de-anonymization. If you pay with cash, there's no purchase ident…
The article's central premise is that the items purchased provide unique fingerprints to identify a person. As I understand it, the study used cc numbers to link records to build their system, then once it was built, they could use shopping habits solely.
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Re: Your shopping habits are uniquely identifiable
#23What these tools do is "generalize", which is essentially the same as "discriminate". (If someone makes generalizing assumptions about another person, then whether this is based on shopping-behavior, or skin-color, is not relevant.) Hence such tools should be forbidden, or at least their use restricted.
We should be so lucky. The problem with these tools is precisely that they successfully specialize, in substantial and generally-reliably detail.
No, the problem is that if these tools are incorrect then they are falsely discriminating. If they are correct, then they are freaky. And then there is the problem that you don't know when they are correct.
There's just too many things fundamentally wrong with this kind of application of technology.
Re: Your shopping habits are uniquely identifiable
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
My work experience includes working in retail where we hand recorded the numbers on large bills each night and in the morning. I'm pretty sure banks track these numbers; what makes you believe yours don't?
But that's completely useless for this purpose unless the bank supplying the cash also recorded the numbers, and "mostly harmless" even if they were (see below). What makes me sure the banks I use don't suitably track the numbers is that I show up to them with $20s just acquired from an ATM (saves time) and they don't take any actions that would allow recording of the numbers of the $100s they give me in return. The…
The last time I with Drew a large sum from the bank, he did run it through accounting machine and most of those have OCR abilities.
Businesses I've been involved with write down the serial numbers of high denomination bills when cash drawers are filled. I wouldn't be surprised if banks were aware of which serials were in their cash drawers for inventory purposes basically.
It's true that the only real tracking that goes on with serial numbers currently to catch criminals is recorded cereals in bank robberies and black market transactions. However, the capability is there to construct some small amount of conclusions about regular people based on where bills go. I wasn't saying it's widely in use for everyday surveillance.