Your shopping habits are uniquely identifiable

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7945073/credit-card-metadata-reveals-purchase-history-study

by somberi • 11 years ago

40 22 11 years ago

bruceb• 11 years ago

While obvious to say, use cash.

wink• 11 years ago

Not completely true, as I only learnt about a week ago, back in the day an anonymous appartment of the Red Army Faction was discovered exactly because they paid their power bill with cash - something that's highly uncommon (even then) in Germany.[1]

So yes, buy stuff with cash in shops and/or if there's enough other people doing it.

[1]: german article: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13519259.html

Jekyll• 11 years ago

May not be long before shops go cashless. With increasing numbers of people using the magic plastic - cash may fade out over time. Also, bank notes (at least in the UK) sometimes have serial numbers so it isn't wholly foolproof.

code_duck3• 11 years ago

In the US, banks and most businesses who accept cash track the serial numbers of 50 and 100 denominated bills. I would imagine that banks keep a handle on the serials of their 20s as well, which are by far the bills most commonly dispensed from ATMs.

claar• 11 years ago

Assuming you've never used non-cash, you mean?

If your purchase habits are uniquely trackable, upon switching to cash you'd need to modify your purchasing habits sufficiently to disassociate them from your past-self. Good luck!

privong• 11 years ago

If your purchase habits are uniquely trackable, upon switching to cash you'd need to modify your purchasing habits sufficiently to disassociate them from your past-self.

I do not think that's quite right, at least in this instance. For the study in the article, the use of a single credit card number links purchases together, which is what enables the de-anonymization. If you pay with cash, there's no purchase identifier, so it is more difficult (impossible?) to link multiple purchases to an individual (anonymous) person. This potentially changes, if people are tracking serial numbers on bills.

amelius2• 11 years ago

What these tools do is "generalize", which is essentially the same as "discriminate".

(If someone makes generalizing assumptions about another person, then whether this is based on shopping-behavior, or skin-color, is not relevant.)

Hence such tools should be forbidden, or at least their use restricted.

jerf• 11 years ago

We should be so lucky. The problem with these tools is precisely that they successfully specialize, in substantial and generally-reliably detail.

amelius2• 11 years ago

No, the problem is that if these tools are incorrect then they are falsely discriminating. If they are correct, then they are freaky. And then there is the problem that you don't know when they are correct.

There's just too many things fundamentally wrong with this kind of application of technology.

kshatrea• 11 years ago

Patterns are uniquely generated in almost all types of information. What has been missing until the great rise of the World Wide Web is intent to monetize. Earlier companies sold you products like Microsoft Windows, Coca-Cola and Apple Macintoshes. Advertising paradigms like television advertising, radio, newspapers while really nice, had a "last-mile-connectivity" problem - you never really knew how you got your customer - through TV, radio? I do understand Nielsen and other ratings companies and some TV analytics historically try to ameliorate this, but the internet has been the greatest driving force in the last few years. Google and Facebook etc. and internet driven content engines have all traded eyeballs for content or products. As a result, the intent to improve advertising for the eyeballs (since presumably the eyeball count has a theoretical upper bound) has become the force du jour. Hence the ability to identify stuff was there, except for the machine learning part which has grown up from academia tremendously. It is just that now we have the intent to use all this to identify and collect patterns from all sorts of data. Whether that is good or bad or gray is another matter.

junto• 11 years ago

My role in the house is to buy the cat food and the hard liquor.

I imagine someone at the supermarket statistics centre studying my shopping habits and wondering how one family can survive on whisky and Friskies Chicken & tuna dinners.

mattzito• 11 years ago

It's not that uncommon - I had a meeting with wal-mart's data team once where they talked about how there are certain pairs of purchases that are highly correlated with male shoppers - beer and diapers was one I remembered.

travis_in_sd2• 11 years ago

While amusing to consider, I doubt there is an employe combing over records. Most likely, it's an automated system.

greggyb• 11 years ago

I came in expecting something like an Amazon shopping history. I don't find it too surprising that in-person purchases can be tracked so readily - geographic information is a huge dimension to add to these data. It would be interesting to see how many data points are necessary to achieve similar accuracy just with a purchase history. Particularly interesting would be matching users across websites.

joshfraser• 11 years ago

You can also buy anyone's entire credit card purchase history directly from FirstData (the behind the scenes processor for most of the credit cards in the world). It's not cheap, but it's most definitely for sale.

stygiansonic• 11 years ago

Direct link to the research paper: ("Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata")

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/536.full

Your shopping habits are uniquely identifiable

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