Thread by @WolfieChristl

So, MasterCard sells purchase data to Google and others. Both are not open about it at all.

My take: exploiting knowledge based on combining/matching *individual-level* data = systems of consumer mass surveillance, whether 'double-blind encryption' or not bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Anyway, great reporting by @mhbergen and @jennysurane.

This was an open question since Google stated that they take advantage of "third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions" in the US in May 2017: adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/poweri…

Of course it's better when they use data mining tech that allows extracting knowledge from data about individual behaviors across firms without disclosing more data as necessary to each other. For pointers about how they might really do it see this thread:

https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1035297866829291520

There may be socially valuable purposes where such tech makes sense. But I don't think that attributing purchases to ad expositure at 1:1 level is one of them.

And in the case of MasterCard and Google I'm sure it goes strongly against all expectations of a majority of consumers.

It's a shame that data giants such as MasterCard and Google are not required to disclose detailed information about ALL their third-party data partnerships by default. Trade secrets? Sorry, the societal implications of such partnerships can be massive, both short- and long-term.

I wrote about MasterCard, Visa, and how they share information with third-party companies including consumer data brokers in my reports from 2016 and 2017:
crackedlabs.org/dl/Christl_Spi…
crackedlabs.org/dl/CrackedLabs…

Take for example Oracle, which has recently become a large consumer data broker. They also receive+sell MasterCard data. In its "data directory", Oracle states that "insights" from purchases can be attached to any web surfer, "without inferred modeling":
oracle.com/us/solutions/c…

Commerce Signals, another consumer data broker, states to enable access to "insights" from "approximately 59% percent of U.S. credit card purchases in near-real-time", powered by "actual transaction data from the world’s leading payment providers": commercesignals.com/27975-2/

Are these data sharing practices also used in the European Union?

Important question by @je5perl:

https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1035511711623794688

Payment companies increasingly share data with others to target, track and sort consumers across context for marketing.

And btw. then there's this (even more) evil twin of pervasive marketing surveillance - data sharing and profiling for fraud analytics:

https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1029698522956877824

"Historically, banks have mostly used whatever purchase data they have to improve their fraud controls. Then startups began…"

Another txt by @jennysurane on Cardlytics, which "analyzed $1.5tn in purchase data from 2,000 financial institutions" last year: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

"My educated guess is that Google did direct integrations with MasterCard and a handful of large banks and acquirers"

Blog by Tom Noyes from 2017, who markets his data company Commerce Signals (see above), but also provides some interesting insights:
blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4659

I take everything he writes with a grain of salt, but he has some more interesting blogs:

"Google has 'access' to 70% of US transaction data through Mastercard, 1-2 participating processors, a bank data aggregator, and retailers sending data to Google" (blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4805)

On payments data & banks:

"...most banks have NO IDEA of how their data is being used. Banks give out raw data to the [credit] bureaus, and their marketing teams have given “anonymized” data to many other entities (ie Argus, Affinity, Cardlytics, …etc)"
blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4695

On retailers sharing purchase data with Google and FB:

"The bank/mastercard issue is NOTHING compared to retailer sharing of SKU level info with Google/FB. Most top 50 retailers send Goog/FB near real time SKU level data" (

https://twitter.com/noyesclt/status/1035358270159028231

)

Blog: blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4791

"It’s not so much that Google has been using credit card data to help advertisers run more effective ads. It’s that Google is doing these things on a tremendous scale, and and the full nature of what it’s been doing was kept secret"

Both, but yes.
gizmodo.com/google-reporte…