Santander To Track Customer Location Via Mobiles and Tablets

New submitter raburton writes: Santander (one of the biggest banks in Europe) slipped a little note on the corner of my latest statement saying they intend to start collecting "location or other data" from mobiles and tablets that their customers own, from 1st July 2015. There is no link to further information about the policy, or any suggestion you can opt out of it. The stated aim is of course to "prevent and detect fraud", but once they have the data (and they'll probably keep it for a long time) they, or anyone who can gain access to it, can do whatever they like with it. In this day and age I find it hard to take any assurances to the contrary very seriously. Is this kind of policy common practice with banks elsewhere?

Comments

Re:extremely common fraud protection

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh, you're the asshole who did that? I love how you totally ignored the fact that you made it not work for the large number of people who use VPNs. Somehow Google can keep a list of VPNs when it comes to spam, but that same list disappears suddenly when it's time to verify EMAIL LOGINS. And to make it all go away, I only have to give my phone number...which I don't care to reveal to Google as they are only going to abuse the information, either today or in the future. I appreciate the link to the support page that apparently only you knew.

I'd like to thank you for all the times I had my account disabled despite repeatedly clicking on "that was me". I'd like to especially endorse the "you will change your password, NOW!" screens that made me repeatedly change passwords, making me forget how to enter my password by memory and leading to that one time at the airport where I couldn't log in for the life of me. But hey, the information was just hanging out there, why not use it? amirite?

I've worked in anti-fraud before and one thing we always had was a "this user is not normal, do not disable the account for strange activity" flag. Too bad this blatantly obvious feature was not included (or publicized).