the walls have ears

[cellio]

Yesterday I got a statement from my credit-card company. It was a transaction summary for 2005; I've never seen this sort of thing before. The front page informed me that last year I spent $X on food, $Y on entertainment, $Z on professional services, and so on for about 15 broad categories. That's the sort of thing that could be useful if you don't think about it -- but I'm the kind of person who thinks about it.

I'm not sure which possibility is more disturbing: that they are making inferences based on who the payee is (Giant Eagle sounds like groceries, etc), or that the merchants are providing the credit-card companies with categories for the transactions.

My record-keeping is not thorough enough for me to figure out which is more likely on my own. Perhaps I will ask them.

When I use a credit card I fully expect that the particulars of the transaction -- date, amount, and merchant -- are not private and might be mined. If it's really important to me, I pay cash. But I do not expect a description, even a high-level one, of the goods or services purchased to be part of that record.

Comments

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

He's right about the categories; however it's also true that most of the info on what you buy gets recorded and is available for data mining against your profile. That's one reason you get individually printed ads on your magazines, etc.

If you do it with a credit card, what you got, where you got it, and what your demographics are goes into a db someplace.

I'm going to kick the soapbox under the table for a while, because I feel a rant coming on. Sorry.