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Comment by dorkwood | Hacker News Reader

I suspect all the people putting this claim on the same level as "my phone is listening to me" conspiracy theories are living outside of the USA.

One of the first things I noticed after moving to America was that I was being served ads for oddly specific in-store purchases. I checked my bank's terms and discovered that, sure enough, they were sharing my transaction history with "non-affiliates" so that they could market to me.

From memory, they did offer opt-out methods for limiting the amount of data that they shared. Maybe you could see if your bank offers the same?

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Well the other problem in America is the payment rails are very primitive. How does your credit card company know which items you’re buying, when the payment description will be something cryptic that you can only sometimes even match to the store name and that’s it. It’s not like your credit card company gets an itemized receipt of your purchases.

I’ve actually worked at a company that was purchasing this data from banks, it was all anonymized and we were looking for trends. Maybe there are other companies that are able to buy the pii data and use it for marketing, but I think there are better, simpler sources. The stores/brands themselves can sell the data about their customers, or they are passing it to google to run targeted ads on their own customers and then google now has that data too and can use it for other things, etc.

At least some credit card companies support (in some cases) getting an itemized receipt - I know I've been in my AMEX account and been able to see the full details of a purchase.

It needs the credit card company, the payment processor, and the merchant to all have compatible systems that support it. I know I've seen it advertised as a feature of some business cards.

Your phone is listening (or at least some are) - I thought it was crazy until I was corrected by https://twitter.com/thezedwards who actually helped build one, reformed himself, and now does pro privacy work.

Did he tweet about it or?

Yeah, I honestly couldn't be arsed to search in the twitter hose but he specifically corrected me on the topic.

edit: and to clarify his comments were mostly that the data is not realtime, but the idea that audio recorded is then processed and within a day or two was much more realistic.

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