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Comment by probdist | Hacker News Reader

This isn't that surprising as a thing that generates value. My questions are 1) how is this legal, and 2) what kind of agreement was forged with the credit card providers to make this possible?

If we recall back a few months, analysts at Capital One were investigated and charged by the SEC related to insider trading of consumer stocks by examining very similar information streams.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...

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My questions are 1) how is this legal, and 2) what kind of agreement was forged with the credit card providers to make this possible?

Of course it is legal. Credit card companies have had agreements in place to share information like this for years. In some cases it isn't anonymized either. Acxiom[1] is probably the best known company working in this area.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/business/a-data-broker-off...

The credit card data derived real time sales estimates were criminally insider information when individual people at firms were doing it (see Capital One case). It is okay for entire firms to be based around this same type of data stream?

Especially as an invitation only "not public" offering.

Capital One had a financial insider relationship with the company they were trading, and were sourcing the information using that relationship. The article notes that this was "misappropriation" insider trading, not the normal case.

Even then, it wasn't a clear-cut case.

If you are sourcing the data from other sources and don't have that kind of relationship it really isn't going to be a problem

There's a difference between selling your information to marketers and trading on material non public information. I don't really see how consumer credit card data isn't material non public information, and if indeed it weren't, we should have expected to see Visa set up a hedge fund arm years ago.

Datalogix is another: Our database contains more than $2 trillion in offline purchase-based data and we’re able to convert this data, and any CRM data, into an online universe.[0]

[0] http://www.datalogix.com/audiences/online/

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