Thread by @FrontierRJ

Mastercard knows where you shop, on what day, and how much you spend - and it sells that data widely to third parties like data brokers and advertisers. Our new investigation out today: 1/pirg.org/edfund/resourc…

Mastercard has multiple channels it uses to sell transaction data. Mastercard is present on a lot of the major 3rd party data marketplaces, like LiveRamp, Oracle’s BlueKai, and Amazon’s Data Exchange 2/ aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp…

It also sells transaction data in its Data & Services division with >25 products, including Dynamic Yield where you can “leverage Mastercard’s proprietary prediction models & aggregated consumer spend insights” to understand “each users’ unique habits” 3/
dynamicyield.com/element/

In 2008, a Mastercard exec said in an interview that figuring out how to “leverage that gold mine of data that occurs when you have 18.7 billion transactions that you’re processing” was a big priority for the company. 4/ networkworld.com/article/227421…

Its data monetization has only grown since then - and it should stop. When companies sell data, it increases the risks for the people whose data is being sold, ranging from security issues to being bombarded with creepy targeted ads all the time 5/ pirg.org/edfund/article…

@PIRG is happy to join @accountabletech @aclu @consumerfed @digitaldemoc @eff @epicprivacy @privacytoday & @oaklandprivacy in calling on Mastercard to stop its deceptive data sales practices. 6/ pirg.org/edfund/resourc…

If you’re a Mastercard holder and want to take more control of your data, you have some options to limit what the company does with your information. We outline it in our tips guide below 7/ pirg.org/resources/mast…

But the bottom line: no company should ever use our data for anything other than delivering the service the we're expecting to get. No shady data sales or other surprising 2nd uses we may not want to be a part of. Srsly - enough is enough pirg.org/take-action/te…