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Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

vice.com

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#11

The only antidote to this kind of profiteering is a cultural shift. And if starts with us, the developers who are building this tech. Unfortunately most of us are quite powerless to stop it otherwise. As time passes I'm only more convinced that this is an evil which will inevitably be abused by governments in the near future to target dissidents. And possibly other groups - you don't need much information from spendi…

I respectfully disagree. People will always choose free and lazy. It will take legislation and that is much much harder here than in the EU. I'm not sure what the required cultural shift that would push for these laws would take to get started and gain traction.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#12
post #2

From my observations, for data vendors "anonymization" generally just involves replacing a name or credit card number with some other identifier. That's the reality and that's all they are required to do by regulators. People on both sides of the market know and leverage this. There are legitimate use cases that people are after that can only be achieved by having the ability to correlate pseudonymous entities with s…

> "anonymization" generally just involves replacing a name or credit card number with some other identifier.

DJB's description of "anonymization" while talking[1] about his job as the man in the middle at Verizon:

>> Hashing is magic crypto pixie-dust, which takes personally identifiable information and makes it incomprehensible to the marketing department. When a marketing person looks at random letters and numbers they have no idea what it means. They can't imagine that anybody could possibly understand the information, reverse the hash, correlate the hashes, track them, save them, record them.

> lots of industry standard analyses unachievable with those identifiers out of the picture.

Calling something "standard" doesn't mean it's ethical. If someone wants use that type of identifier, they need to get explicit informed consent from everyone involved, and they need to be liable for any damages that derive from their database of identified records.

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#13
post #9

I use Google Opinion Rewards and I feel like some of their questions are meant to see if they can deanonymize identities from credit card data and a few location data point.

They push hard to track in-store visit and purchase attribution

[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6100636?hl=en [2] https://martechtoday.com/deep-dive-online-in-store-attributi...

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#14
post #5
post #3

Guess why would Apple/Uber/even Starbucks release their own credit cards?

Heck. I thought the SB one was a joke. It's not. https://www.starbucks.com/starbucks-rewards/rewards-cards TF is even going on here!? I face-palmed so hard everyone in MHT is staring.

Interest income, plus a cut of every transaction (even if not at Starbucks). Plus added spend at Starbucks - having a Starbucks card may entice more spend at Starbucks.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#15
>millions of Americans

I always want to ask... does this mean people living in the US or US citizens? because the meaning sounds like its limited to citizens but I'm almost positive any stats that say 'Americans' means 'people in America'.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#16

Yesterday, a fellow customer of one of the big US wireless telecom carriers received a spoofed call from my mobile number. He called me up thinking I had called him, and we started talking, and turns out he’s a Data Broker from the East Coast (I’m on the West Coast). He was very friendly and discussed specifics for how the mobile phone anonymous token works and how it’s supposedly a secure, anonymous arrangement. I d…

SHAKEN/STIR is rolling out very, very, very slowly. Interoperability is poorly defined and carriers seem to be sharing on an ad-hoc basis.

Anyone with a prepaid credit card can spoof numbers, make calls for < $0.005/minute, just by running apt-get install asterisk with a minimal configuration.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#17
And leaked documents will also show how VICE exploits users by exploiting their privacy through ad trackers. Gosh I wonder what could be worst? LOL!! Lets NOT quickly forget how Mr. Joe Biden's presidential campaign has been financed through credit card companies.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#18
And leaked documents will also show how VICE exploits users by exploiting their privacy through ad trackers. Gosh I wonder what could be worst? LOL!! Lets NOT quickly forget how Mr. Joe Biden's presidential campaign has been financed through credit card companies. - UMM NO we are NOT deleting this I will keep posting it

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#19

And leaked documents will also show how VICE exploits users by exploiting their privacy through ad trackers. Gosh I wonder what could be worst? LOL!! Lets NOT quickly forget how Mr. Joe Biden's presidential campaign has been financed through credit card companies. - UMM NO we are NOT deleting this I will keep posting it

This has been mentioned many times about [insert large news website here] about how they're article talks about why tracking is bad yet the article is on a website with paywalls, anti-ad blockers, tracking etc.

The reason is the same: the people who write the articles are different from those who choose the poor tracking decisions.

Re: Leaked doc shows how big companies buy credit card data on millions of Americans

#20

>millions of Americans I always want to ask... does this mean people living in the US or US citizens? because the meaning sounds like its limited to citizens but I'm almost positive any stats that say 'Americans' means 'people in America'.

'American' doesn't necessarily mean citizen. It can be used to describe people simply living in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_(word)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/American

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