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Mastercard, Visa To Help Target Ads
New submitter ThatsMyNick writes "The two largest credit-card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., are pushing into a new business: using what they know about people's credit-card purchases for targeting them with ads online. 'A MasterCard document obtained by the Journal outlines some of the company's plans, which included linking Web users with purchases. According to document, the credit card provider said it believes "you are what you buy." ... Visa is planning a similar service, which would aggregate its customers' purchase history into segments, including location, to make ads more effective at appealing to people in a respective area.'"
Hello cash!
I'm for small government and as much a libertarian as anyone here, but this is one of those times where the government needs to step in and put some regulation in place.
We need something similar to the do-not-call-list thingie they did a few years ago for telephone numbers, where you opt yourself in and you don't get hounded at home from telemarketers.
How much is enough? The rich suck up money like vacuums, and the media inundate us with intrusive advertising.
Ever watch a YouTube video on Facebook with Chrome? Aren't you annoyed by that damned popup overlay banner at the bottom pushing even more Google advertising?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Personally they could post a list of all my visa purchases on a public website with my name right at the top and I wouldn't care.. but I can still understand why other people get upset about this kinda stuff.
Some people do have (perfectly legal) things they want to hide for whatever social or practical reasons.
Is there anyone who has nothing to hide?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I would be curious to see what effect services like PayPal would have on the ability for credit card companies to sell your data to advertisers. Do they still receive the relevant data, or is that retained at PayPal's level?
Granted, there's also nothing to prevent PayPal from doing the same thing with the customer data it collects. Back to gold doubloons handled with gloves, I suppose...
Didn't we already? I'm pretty sure that this would violate the EU Data Protection Directive.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's been around for a while now. Haven't you noticed when you log into your social networking sites, you get ads based on what you've purchased or the hotels you've stayed in? It's what map reduce technologies will allow these companies to do more and more of in the future. Imagine this: your frequent flier miles cards, super market frequent shopper cards, credit cards, online transactions and people with whom you socially interact with online -- all that data will be used to compile an consumer profile on which companies will base their marketing and advertising. Cell phone companies already use it to figure out how likely it is that you'll jump ship to another carrier -- based on the habits of your friends on social networks. It's all very creepy and big brotherish.
Dude, it looks like you just bought a diamond ring! Congratulations on getting married!!!
...
Oh, you haven't proposed yet? Well, good luck!
Rather than hiding behind the fact that they probably won't do that, why don't you put your money log where your mouth is and post a history of all your credit card purchases in response to this post? Include times and locations.
I'm not trying to get in the middle of your specific spat or privacy terror, but isn't there an extremely practical problem now that MC and Visa can be used to pay medical bills, vs HIPPA and all that?
I'm sure they can figure out which billers to filter out, but it does bring up the point that its not just a tinfoil hat thing but a possible HIPPA legal violation.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
make ads more effective at appealing to people in a respective area
Please, please no...I hate this place and the people in it with a passion, the last thing I want is to be bombarded with the bullshit they buy -.-
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Actually, I partially agree with your sentiment. I worry more about privacy on the personal level and not on the corporate, world-spanning level. To clarify:
I don't give a rat's ass what Visa knows about me, and what Google collects about my searches and what info they get from it. Corporations want to spend millions of $$$ to harvest all my online activities and send me ads in my mail or on a site I visit? Let them have their fun. I don't give a damn. May they grow old and die chocking on their money, for all I care.
For me privacy is that only people I know can link my name to what I do (job, hobbies, friends, purchases, etc.). On this site, if you go through all my posts you can only find out which country I live in, my job and 1-2 of my hobbies, that's all. That's privacy. If some company aggregates all my actions on-line (or credit card purchases) in one big file, I don't mind; it's not like it's on some big bulletin board for my grandma to find.
Oh, and BTW, for years now I get ads and coupons in my monthly CC statement, usually targeted to stuff I buy, how is it different from what the summary mentions?
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Its a lot simpler to post a link to your blippy profile
There are people who volunteer for this. Financial equivalent of exhibitionism, or conspicuous consumption carried out to its logical conclusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blippy
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
90% of what I buy goes through american express. The other good thing about American Express is that they haven't jumped onto this "pay wave" band wagon in Australia. I don't know if "pay wave" exists anywhere else in the world, but for small purchases a visa card or master card can be waved in front of a plastic brick that doesn't work. What should happen is that the transaction is automatically authorised without a pin or signature, representing a complete U-turn on fraud prevention strategies. The ads on TV make it look instantaneous and fun, with young, attractive people dancing and smiling and running about and buying cool products. The reality is that the thing just beeps with red lights until the acne-infested store assistant loses patience and grabs your card before running a regular transaction using the chip or the magnetic strip. Genius.
We have them here in the US as well. I have never seen them work.
And I'm glad, because they're terrible for security.
I'm also glad whenever a store checks my ID or the signature on the back of my card (which they are specifically forbidden from doing in their contracts with visa/american express/master card/discover).
Banks profit from fraud because the vast majority of it goes unreported.
Banks thus encourage fraud at every opportunity.
So... You're not home usually between X and Y. Bought a new TV, expensive computer, key hiding rock.
Information is power.
Deleted
I hope you're joking 'cause in this day and age some people actually believe that tripe.
I'd imagine that one good security breach could bring down the whole house of cards.
Well maybe your house of cards, theirs is still nicely safe.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
In the not so distant future...
I can see MC and Visa getting sued for targeting somebody with a sex shop ad on a PG13 website in front of their family.
yeah, next thing you'll tell me that *you* buried paul.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Took years for Amazon to figure out how to do that ;)
... use Google to find out what the folks there buy with their credit cards. KKK hoods? Anti-vaccination literature? Cannibalism Club Dues? Schizophrenia self-help books? Crack house paraphernalia? See what they've got under their fingernails . . .
Real Estate Agent: "Oh, it's a nice neighborhood, with pleasant people!"
You: "And they seem to spend a lot of money on books about how to annoy and sue their neighbors. And which one bought the cat skinning machine?"
It could influence your choice of location.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If you have nothing to hide
Funny how that concept got left out of the Consitution or any of the debates, letters, or treatises that shaped it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This guy sure loves porno!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbMuEjASwzg
The /. assumption is its all gonna be hospital bills paid by Visa HIPPA violations and sex toy purchases. What if I don't really care about keeping a certain subset private, say "books" or "anything I bought at amazon.com"?
OK /. here is a list of stuff I purchased recently using a CC:
I ebayed a HP (made back when HP was "cool") WR-42 waveguide frequency meter for a ham radio 24 GHZ thing I'm working on (thats twenty four GHZ not two point four)
I bought a quantity of tapioca maltodextrin to experiment with edible oil sands (tastier than it sounds). With the idea of making a sandy italian salad, if that makes any sense. I know its hydrophillic, I guess I'll find out if its deliquescent soon enough...
Sitting on my desk unread is a Stephen Wolfram paperback of all his comp sci papers. Glance thru looks interesting. I enjoyed ANKOS. Hoping for a rainy, reading filled weekend filled with cellular automata. Or maybe next week, who knows.
Nature Publishing Group had an "impact" sale where you can subscribe for the impact number of the journal rather than the list price. No way in Fing hell I'm paying $299 or whatever it is for Nature Physics paper journal. But I'll subscribe for $18 or whatever it was exactly. I suppose just the gasoline to drive to the library every month will pay for this... I'm not sure how they're even keeping up with postage costs at $18.
Does anyone, myself, /., or the NSA, really care about any of this or find any actionable info in this?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've been expecting this for some time. Google only knows what you look at. Visa and MasterCard know what you do. Amazon does this now, but only for sales within Amazon's system. Now it can work for everyone.
This could upset Google's dominance in online advertising. If some other search engine or social network partnered with Visa and MasterCard, they could do search ads much better than Google can.
American Express in the US does have the "pay wave" thing, their term for it is Express Pay. I've never used it. You can contact Amex and have the feature disabled on your account so the transactions don't get approved, but the RFID chip is still present in the card so conceivably some bad guy can poll it for data.
End of Line.
I use mine all the time, it works great. I am not liable for fraudulent charges so why do I care?
Some people do have (perfectly legal) things they want to hide for whatever social or practical reasons.
Some of us have 'things we want to hide' (or what we would cause 'a desire for privacy') for no social or practical reason, and find it weird that anyone would think that needs a justification.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Master card appears to have an opt out page. Anyone know if there's something similar for Visa?
I don't think I want to be a " TARGET " of anything.
They're viewing you as prey.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Yet another reason to try to go more cash only....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's a good thing that everyone something to hide, isn't it?
No...but the walrus was Paul....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Time and location I'd want to keep secret for largely practical reasons.
Specific restaurants I'd probably not care but I can see if someone was trying to avoid someone else how this may be an issue.
Other than that though, would be pretty damn boring. You'd find out I spend a lot on computer junk and play guitar .. I actually gave a short list later in this thread.
I agree with this too.
I think people do have a right to privacy. The fact that I'm not overly concerned with privacy (at least not on spending habits) doesn't mean I don't recognize that people have the right to say "I don't want you to know that" if for absolutely no other reason than they don't want you to.
Your bank shouldn't give out your data to the card companies so theoretically they only know the ATM the transaction was made from, so they can change ads respectively in the area.
I'm also glad whenever a store checks my ID or the signature on the back of my card (which they are specifically forbidden from doing in their contracts with visa/american express/master card/discover).
http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/card_present.html
"6. Check the signature. Be sure that the signature on the card matches the one on the sales draft. Do not accept an unsigned card."
In addition, what does PCI have to say about this?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Do you think they'll sell your information to third parties
Umm they have been doing that for decades...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Given the addiction that marketdroids have to execute their poorly designed crap on other peoples machines via javascript and flash, its ad-block + no-script + ghostery FTW.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Except in Louisiana
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You would have to start at nudist colony's. Most people hide themselves.
Rod Taylor
If you have nothing to see (ad-block) you have nothing to fear.
You do know that the government can dragnet through corporate data easily enough w/o warrant or order, though, right? And that this aggregated, personalized data will be made available to other companies, like...oh...insurance companies. Your spending history will affect your rates with them, much like your credit history already can do...
One of these days, it will become a level of fraud for you to claim a non-smoker discount on your health insurance but the insurance company, through your spending data, discovers you have a history of buying tobacco products, and assumes that you're the one it all has been bought for and consumed by... It won't be simple enough to insure you at a higher rate or riskier bucket...
I'm also glad whenever a store checks my ID or the signature on the back of my card (which they are specifically forbidden from doing in their contracts with visa/american express/master card/discover).
http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/card_present.html
"6. Check the signature. Be sure that the signature on the card matches the one on the sales draft. Do not accept an unsigned card."
Go read actual contracts signed by actual merchants.
They all specifically preculde merchants from checking ID or the signature, even if the signature is blank.
This is because the agreements all have clauses that say you must match the terms of any competing card, to the benefit of the cardholder being able to complete the transaction.
If American Express lets the merchant require a minimum transaction amount for credit, but Visa doesn't, a merchant who accepts both American Express and Visa is not allowed to enforce a minimum transaction amount on American Express users.
The same goes for processing fees charged to the cardholder, ID verification, signature verification, signature requirements/thresholds, etc.
The only cards that don't trigger the must match clauses are store-specific cards (like a Best Buy card, or a Victoria's secret card), and debit/prepaid cards (they're an entirely different class of transaction).
Furthermore, security features, such as the digits on the back of the card, programs like Verified by Visa, and RFID/Chip and PIN/whatever shit are all optional and intentionally shitty. Banks foist these features on merchants because it puts the burden on the merchant when fraud occurs.
If you save your credit card on Amazon, they ask for the digits on the back of the card. These digits are never supposed to be stored, but Amaazon either stores them anyway, or verifies it once and then runs all future transactions without it. The lack of those digits does nothing to prevent a transaction from actually going though.
If you have noscript installed and you buy something on Newegg with a Visa card, the Verified by Visa redirect will fail. 5 minutes later your order will still go through.
If I clone someone's RFID-enabled credit card, and then make a fraudulent purchase, the merchant is ultimately on the hook if the actual cardholder initiates a charge back.
It's all horseshit, and the people paying for it are:
- People who don't pay their balance off in full every month
- People who don't notice fraudulent transactions
- Merchants
Funny how this has absolutely nothing to do with the constitution. Or did it start applying to private companies recently?
The Constitution applies to private companies in a thousand and one ways.
How about you try doing this: Start a private business and hang up a sign that says "No Niggers Allowed"
See how long your idea that the Constitution doesn't apply to private companies will hold up against the 14th Amendment.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, "
Personally I think this applies to data about one's self but I do not know if the law agrees.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
For me privacy is that only people I know can link my name to what I do (job, hobbies, friends, purchases, etc.).
and yeah, being able to buy your purchase history will allow me to link your name to purchases with datetime and location, which i can then use to infer your friends, which i can then use to infer your job and hobbies.... but i'll probably have other uses for that info than the short list of things you're worried about.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Go read actual contracts signed by actual merchants.
They all specifically preculde merchants from checking ID or the signature, even if the signature is blank.
How about you cite some evidence I can actually access? I don't know about checking the ID, but I don't believe for a minute that merchants aren't allowed to check the signature, which would be in direct contradiction to Visa published guidelines.
Mr. Anderson, we here at Microsoft would like to hire you. But, your purchasing history indicates you buy exclusively Apple products. We just don't see a place in the company for someone who supports the competition.
Its not that we want to hide anything,we just feel its none of anyone business and that is a big difference then having something to hide
Jack of all trades,master of none
Just how is Visa or Mastercard going to advertise to us using our buying history online? I can only see this being done through email as there is no way for them to know just where we are on the web at any given moment in time. I'm sure as hell not going to download anything from them to serve me ads lol. And they don't have my email address although I'm sure they have plenty of their customers email addresses. But that would be easy to unsubscribe to even if they do.
Jack of all trades,master of none
The legal niceties of this will only be settled after enough people have had their fingers burnt.
Seems to me that the only safe strategy is to never present your credit card information in any kind of trackable transaction. How far you want to carry this depends on your level of paranoia, but I just settle for using an "incognito" window in Chromium for any kind of financial transaction.
I'm going to leave the rest of your comment aside (my opinion is pretty much the opposite, but we're all entitled to our own), and answer this one:
The difference is that, in the case you mention, the advertiser hands over their ad copy, along with a profile of their target demographic, and says to Visa, find the 200,000 of your customers (or whatever #) that most closely match *this* profile, and send them this ad. But, this new plan sounds more to me (although the details aren't precisely discussed in the articles) that Visa will run a service that lets advertisers sign up and repeatedly query "does this customer match this profile?"
In the first case, Visa is giving you the advertiser's info; in the second case, Visa is giving the advertiser your info.
----
Not to be confused with Col.
If don't have anything to hide about my credit card purchases. However, I don't want them to make money with my data unless I get some kind of compensation. Credit cards aren't free, I shouldn't be the product being sold.
That's gonna get repealed REALLY fast I'm thinking...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Go read actual contracts signed by actual merchants.
They all specifically preculde merchants from checking ID or the signature, even if the signature is blank.
How about you cite some evidence I can actually access? I don't know about checking the ID, but I don't believe for a minute that merchants aren't allowed to check the signature, which would be in direct contradiction to Visa published guidelines.
Visa says merchants have to check the signature. But they aren't allowed to check it against anything. Not an ID, not the name on the front of the card, not the receipt that they sign, nothing. It can be a smudge. It can be "Frosty Piss". It can be "See ID" (and no, this does not let them check your ID). As long as there's a smudge of ink there, it's signed. And if it's blank, the person can sign it right there in front of the merchant and then it's valid. So it's a useless step, and no one gives a shit.
You can go ask merchants to see their contracts with Visa/MC/etc. if you don't believe it.
About the only merchant I know of who IS still allowed to verify signatures against an ID is the US Post Office.
As for IDs themselves, many states have laws that prohibit merchants from requiring ID / recording information from an ID / etc. (unless required for shipping).
i will pay 2 chickens for that roll of copper
Again, you have cited no evidence. If it were true, you'd think you'd be able to find at least one merchant who said this online, or some discussion of policy.
Did you completely skip over the "Some people do have (perfectly legal) things they want to hide for whatever social or practical reasons." bit, which pretty much covers everything you listed... and was kind of the whole point of my post.
Come on man, my post was only two paragraphs! Not even big ones!