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How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

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Re: How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

#11

Post by StopHammoTime »

4death4 wrote: post #9
dakial1 wrote: post #7

I never understood why Meta didn't buy mastercard/visa as this would give it a greater grip on people's personal data.

Because both companies are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars? Meta couldn’t afford it.

I think people tend to forget that while there is a lot of money in tech, there’s a lot more money in money (finance) xD.

Re: How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

#12

Post by hedora »

I remember when banks weren’t allowed to sell transaction data.

I wonder if the law changed, or if the root cause of this being allowed is an enforcement / judicial issue.

I also wonder if they managed to get a carve out for themselves in California’s recently-passed universal data broker opt-out law.

Re: How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

#13

Post by codersfocus »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #4
jjgreen wrote: post #3

Cash doesn't have this problem.

https://www.wheresgeorge.com/

Apparently this site patented itself. What a sad state of affairs that they give patents out like candy. I feel like the governent patent agents are the lowest hanging fruit of things to change. Get rid of them and have private "bondsmen" that are responsible for every patent, where they need to have (average cost of patent litigation) * N held somewhere and it's ripe for the taking if they fail to defend it in court.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8682917B2/en

Re: How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

#14

Post by maeil »

senkora wrote: post #6

A lot of these products descend from their Applied Predictive Technologies acquisition back in 2015. APT was a very interesting company. It was a hybrid between a business consulting company and a software company. And by that I mean, if you saw them at the Harvard career fair they would tell you that they were a consulting company, and if you saw them at the CMU career fair they would tell you that they were a softw…

Sounds very similar to Palantir, except for the part about telling others that they're a consulting company.

Re: How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

#15

Post by craighay1 »

It was unclear from the article whether this applies to only credit card transactions or also Mastercard debit cards. At least it is possible to choose not to use credit cards, a bit harder with debit.

I'd love to see how this data is "anonymised".

On a related note, in the UK at least, all of the big supermarkets have switched their loyalty card (data harvesting schemes) from offering "points" per unit spend to offering direct large discounts on certain items in store. Makes it much more difficult to justify opting out of giving away the details of your personal shopping habits to these corporations.

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