The information provided on this website does not, and is not intended to, act as legal, financial or credit advice; instead, it is for general informational purposes only. Information on this website may not be current. This website may contain links to other third-party websites. Such links are only for the convenience of the reader, user or browser; we do not recommend or endorse the contents of any third-party sites. Readers of this website should contact their attorney, accountant or credit counselor to obtain advice with respect to their particular situation. No reader, user, or browser of this site should act or not act on the basis of information on this site. Always seek personal legal, financial or credit advice for your relevant jurisdiction. Only your individual attorney or advisor can provide assurances that the information contained herein – and your interpretation of it – is applicable or appropriate to your particular situation. Use of, and access to, this website or any of the links or resources contained within the site do not create an attorney-client or fiduciary relationship between the reader, user, or browser and website owner, authors, contributors, contributing firms, or their respective employers.
Credit.com receives compensation for the financial products and services advertised on this site if our users apply for and sign up for any of them. Compensation is not a factor in the substantive evaluation of any product.
According to The Wall Street Journal, MasterCard has shelved the proposal, which it shared with at least four companies, citing regulations that dictate how financial-services companies can use customer info. Interestingly, though the credit card processing giant doesn’t retain people’s names and addresses, it described in a document produced in April “its ‘extensive experience’ linking ‘anonymized purchased attributes to consumer names and addresses’ with the help of third-party companies,” according to WSJ reporter Emily Steel. What MasterCard does retain are details including date and time, dollar value and merchant’s name and address for the 23 billion transactions it facilitates each year.
[Article: Consumer Advocate: Simple Phone Hack Exposes Credit Card History]
Since April, the company’s initial idea has evolved; a spokeswoman says they’ve found “no feasible way” to link purchase history to Internet users. So, MasterCard is taking a different tack, looking at how it might sell marketers “an analysis of anonymous, aggregated data sorted into marketing ‘segments,’ such as people with a high propensity to be interested in international travel,” Steel writes.
Likewise, Visa is also tossing around a preliminary idea of providing advertisers info on aggregated consumer purchase histories, the WSJ reports, citing an ad executive who’d recently spoken with a company official. “That would let advertisers, for instance, show cat-grooming offers to people in one area, and dog-grooming ads to people somewhere else, based on the group buying behavior in the areas as a whole, the ad executive said,” according to Steel.
[Featured Product: Get a free trial credit score]
For those who want to opt-out of having their own data included in such analyses, MasterCard provides a “Data Analytics Opt-Out” page at www.mastercard.us/privacy. A Visa spokeswoman tells the WSJ it provides “notice and choice for products that use their personal information.”
For more on the ways in which credit card data might be put to use by marketers, Steel’s in-depth piece is worth a read. Included is a description of a Visa patent application, published this spring. It suggests that the company sees potential in creating profiles drawn for sources including, “information from social network websites, information from credit bureaus, information from search engines, information about insurance claims, (and) information from DNA databanks.”
[Tool: Quickly assess your risk of identity theft for free]
Image: Mr. Sandman, via Flickr.com
April 9, 2024
Credit Cards
October 21, 2020
Credit Cards
August 3, 2020
Credit Cards