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MasterCard Transactions To Be Mined For CO2 Data
seamus1abshere writes "In the latest twist from Big Data, MasterCard and Brighter Planet today announced that cardholder transaction data will be mined for clues about CO2 emissions. Initial coverage will be of flights, car rentals, hotels and other purchases for which the credit card company stores extra metadata. Interestingly, the science behind the offering is all open source."
While I would dearly love to have Al Gore's data from this enterprise, I'm not so sanguine about him having mine.
I imagine that the most important piece of information regarding the transaction is the supplier and a transaction number. The amount is worthless. How would you match an amount to a product, especially if more than one product is purchased? Many customers pay different amounts for the same product, how will they factor this in? They'd have to ask the supplier what was actually purchased with some kind of order number.
Some services are bought but not redeemed later in the future such as a flight or a cruise ship. They need to work out when a servie is actually utilised.
Somehow I think they'd be better of analysing public transport systems. Such as buses, trains, planes and traffic. If 10 people buy a bus ticket, the bus will expel the same amount of CO2 than if the bus was full. Same with trains, they are quite often under capacity.
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Summary written by a troll.
Press release is about business services. They are releasing a service to help business track their travel expenditures. RTFA if you want the real story.
Is it just me or is the text on most comments cut off to the top half? I tried with Firefox, Chrome, and IE and it's the same with all of them...
This is the most idiotic and trollish response that always gets thrown about. Expending energy to figure out how to save energy can easily be a net positive. I'm sure automotive engineers expelled a great deal of energy designing cars that get 30+ miles to the gallon instead of 15. Electrical engineers spent energy designing LED lighting that is far more efficient than incandescent. But you aren't thinking about that, nor are you thinking at all. You're just trolling, because you've been trained to hate anyone who suggests that CO2 can have a negative impact on the climate.
FTFA: "a new program to help make travel carbon emissions analysis easier ... for the businesses worldwide that use MasterCard corporate cards ... to help businesses more efficiently manage their corporate card programs and meet current and future analytical needs"
This is a program that companies can sign up for, in which Mastercard will help them analyze their corporate travel programs. Al Gore isn't digging through your receipts at the sex toy shop. Ignore all the Republican trolls.
Because according to the cult of global warming, you have no privacy. They're doing this for *your* best interest.
I find the psychology interesting here. Companies have tracked spending on corporate credit cards since forever; after all, it's their money you're spending, not yours, and they don't want you to spend it on booze and hookers. I don't remember ever hearing anyone complain about the principle of this. But as soon as Mastercard start to offer carbon emissions analysis to their corporate customers -- because 80% of those customers wanted it -- we have a dozen outraged comments about "invasion of privacy" and "the cult of global warming".
Just try this: storm into the accounts dept. and tell them you're not going to submit receipts for travel reimbursement, because it's none of their damned business whether you rented a hummer or took the train, and if they say otherwise they're members of the cult of global warming. Maybe you could get the ACLU to take on your case.
Don't worry, the anonymized it by removing your name and address. All they use as an identifier is that random 16-digit number on your card. They have to keep the expiration date as well so they can properly put their data on a time line.
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The short answer is that data is somewhat compartmentalized by department. Each CC transaction first comes through the mainframes, which are very restricted, mostly just for IT. That data is fed nightly to the data warehouse (basically one massive database). A lot of IT get direct access as needed. Some business / reporting applications are then written to query directly from it, limited to the departments that would require it. Any department which needs aggregate data has separate database servers, with data warehouse IT staff facilitating the automatic feed and aggregation of the data.
Requests for data from outside the company are taken case-by-case. So, for example, when I had to write reports for a particular bank (a Mastercard member), I was careful to only pull that bank's data. I didn't filter anything that was specific to their cardholders. For applications which got aggregate data, individual transactions and CC-specific data was never sent to the application's database servers. It was carefully aggregated first at the warehouse, then transmitted. I have to say there wasn't much general oversight, but it's simply enforced by management throughout the company.
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