Mastercard and Customer Information: A Lone Ranger?
October 26, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
In my lectures, I often include a pointer to sites selling personal data. Earlier this month, I explained that the clever founder of Frank Financial acquired email information about high school students from two off-the-radar data brokers. These data were mixed with “real” high school student email addresses to provide a frothy soup of more than a million email addresses. These looked okay. The synthetic information was “good enough” to cause JPMorgan Chase to output a bundle of money to the alleged entrepreneur winners.
A fisherman chasing a slippery eel named Trust. Thanks, MidJourney. You do have a knack for recycling Godzilla art, don’t you?
I thought about JPMorgan Chase when I read “Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data.” The article makes clear that Mastercard sells its customers (users?) data. Mastercard is a financial institution. JPMC is a financial institution. One sells information; the other gets snookered by data. I assume that’s the yin and yang of doing business in the US.
The larger question is, “Are financial institutions operating in a manner harmful to themselves (JPMC) and harmful to others (personal data about Mastercard customers (users?). My hunch is that today I am living in an “anything goes” environment. Would the Great Gatsby be even greater today? Why not own Long Island and its railroad? That sounds like a plan similar to those of high fliers, doesn’t it?
The cited article has a bias. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is allegedly looking out for me. I suppose that’s a good thing. The article aims to convince me; for example:
the company’s position as a global payments technology company affords it “access to enormous amounts of information derived from the financial lives of millions, and its monetization strategies tell a broader story of the data economy that’s gone too far.” Knowing where you shop, just by itself, can reveal a lot about who you are. Mastercard takes this a step further, as U.S. PIRG reported, by analyzing the amount and frequency of transactions, plus the location, date, and time to create categories of cardholders and make inferences about what type of shopper you may be. In some cases, this means predicting who’s a “big spender” or which cardholders Mastercard thinks will be “high-value”—predictions used to target certain people and encourage them to spend more money.
Are outfits like Chase Visa selling their customer (user) data? (Yep, the same JPMC whose eagle eyed acquisitions’ team could not identify synthetic data) and enables some Amazon credit card activities. Also, what about men-in-the-middle like Amazon? The data from its much-loved online shopping, book store, and content brokering service might be valuable to some I surmise? How much would an entity pay for information about an Amazon customer who purchased item X (a 3D printer) and purchased Kindle books about firearm related topics be worth?
The EFF article uses a word which gives me the willies: Trust. For a time, when I was working in different government agencies, the phrase “trust but verify” was in wide use. Am I able to trust the EFF and its interpretation from a unit of the Public Interest Network? Am I able to trust a report about data brokering? Am I able to trust an outfit like JPMC?
My thought is that if JPMC itself can be fooled by a 31 year old and a specious online app, “trust” is not the word I can associate with any entity’s action in today’s business environment.
This dinobaby is definitely glad to be old.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2023
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