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Credit cards have a privacy problem

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#101

Post by petre »

avocado4 wrote: post #96
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the phone numbers of almost everyone, because practically everyone is in the address book of someone who uses an Android phone. Google makes sure that if you don't hand over your data to them, someone else will.

How do they connect phone numbers in Android users' phone book to their respective Gmail accounts?

They associate the phone number used for 2FA with the account or the contact details has an e-mail address entry and it's filled up with a gmail address.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#102

Post by dehrmann »

avocado4 wrote: post #92
dehrmann wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget location data.

Even if they do (for Android users only), how would they connect location data to my credit card history? Are you claiming that Google reverse engineers PII by correlating Android location data with credit card purchase location history?

This doesn't quite say they do exactly that, but they do tie location data to offline purchases.

> Since 2014, Google has flagged for advertisers when someone who clicked an ad visits a physical store, using the Location History feature in Google Maps. Still, the advertiser didn’t know if the shopper made a purchase. So Google added more. A tool, introduced the following year, let advertisers upload email addresses of customers they’ve collected into Google’s ad-buying system, which then encrypted them. Additionally, Google layered on inputs from third-party data brokers, such as Experian Plc and Acxiom Corp., which draw in demographic and financial information for marketers.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#104

Post by prawn »

avocado4 wrote: post #86
dehrmann wrote: post #82

Yup, do-no-evil Google buys your credit card data for advertising purposes: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an... Companies need to start thinking of this less in the lens of "evil" and more principle of least astonishment. Would users be surprised and angry to learn you do this? Then don't.

> Google buys your credit card data for advertising purposes How do they connect my credit card data to my Google activity? My Google account isn't connected to my personally identifiable information in any way. I.e. they don't have my phone number, nor do I use Google Pay.

If you bought things online, couldn't they make guesses based on internet activity and things showing on a statement? e.g., maybe thousands bought x on a specific day, but how many bought x on that day, y on another, and z on a third day, all with corresponding research/signals when browsing?

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#105

Post by nabla9 »

avocado4 wrote: post #86
dehrmann wrote: post #82

Yup, do-no-evil Google buys your credit card data for advertising purposes: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an... Companies need to start thinking of this less in the lens of "evil" and more principle of least astonishment. Would users be surprised and angry to learn you do this? Then don't.

> Google buys your credit card data for advertising purposes How do they connect my credit card data to my Google activity? My Google account isn't connected to my personally identifiable information in any way. I.e. they don't have my phone number, nor do I use Google Pay.

Consider N shopping locations with time stamp and N phone locations with time stamp. The N required to uniquely identify a person with high probability can be just 2-5.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#106

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dehrmann wrote: post #82

Yup, do-no-evil Google buys your credit card data for advertising purposes: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an... Companies need to start thinking of this less in the lens of "evil" and more principle of least astonishment. Would users be surprised and angry to learn you do this? Then don't.

Is there a collection of the sort of unusual / unexpected things that companies do / can do.

Not Google does X, but there is a market that sells X, and X can be linked to you personally by Y, Z

So

* A market exists for reselling credit card transaction data. Your card provider (ie Barclaycard) sells to companies such as $FOO who will aggregate same data from different providers and sells it for marketing purposes. The size of the market is $Billions

* Google can link the purchase history to you personally by multiple means including - reading your gmail, and looking for purchase confirmations using last 4 digits

* There is a market for reselling your mobile location and call history. your cell provider ...

I would love to see this - I honestly need reminding of this and it seems like a great press expose.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#107

Post by FabHK »

I know, I know, the editorial staff is separate from the advertising/sales staff etc, but still find it funny that when I try to access the article in incognito mode, as I habitually do (for privacy), I get

> We noticed you’re browsing in private mode. Private browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers. Turn off private browsing to keep reading this story, or subscribe to use this feature, plus get unlimited digital access.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#108

Post by lotsofpulp »

zaroth wrote: post #77
nemothekid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* I'm asking why their accounts aren't closed.* Because, churners, are a very small portion of the 20B in revenue Visa generated last year, of which it generated a ~50% profit margin. The system works so well already, why rock the boat by closing the accounts of a few thousand individuals? It would probably cost more to enforce any such rule than they lose in revenue.

> $20B in revenue Visa generated last year, of which it generated a ~50% profit margin. I was sure this couldn’t be right... but it absolutely is. https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2018/q4/...

Why wouldn’t it be massive? Infinitely scalable business getting a % of each and every transaction at no marginal cost. It’s basically a tax, there isn’t a better business model out there.

They don’t even take any risk lending money, just a % fee for owning the network, that one has to be on to do business with most people with money nowadays.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#109

Post by reilly3000 »

Purchase data has been around for years. Marketers want to know if their ad dollars worked. “How did you hear about us?” provides scant and mostly unusable data. By matching purchase data with ad campaign data there can be more quantitative evaluation of an ad campaign’s performance.

Additionally I imagine this data is available for marketers to target buyers of Product X with Accessory Y.

Finally, marketers may use purchase data to build suppression lists; ie. Stop retargeting people that already purchased Product X. I don’t know if this happens very often in practice. It’s very hard to do well in general, and generally cheaper to spam people than buy data to shrink your list.

None of this is well-disclosed to consumers, not one bit of it is right. It just is, and it has been for going on for 8+ years.

Re: Credit cards have a privacy problem

#110

Post by EGreg »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #100
avocado4 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they connect phone numbers in Android users' phone book to their respective Gmail accounts?

Because my friend Bob is in my contacts as Bob@Gmail.com and also as 0123456789.

So can’t I put Bill Gates in the same contact as my own phone number?

I guess I would need enough people to do a sybil attack on Google.

I bet this is how Places data and other stuff is hacked. How does one prevent a coordinated attack like this? Machine learning ensuring voting rings can only be used once or twice?

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