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Comment by lkozma | Hacker News Reader

It's also much easier FOR OTHERS to monitor your expenses this way.

I remember the first time I was issued a corporate credit card, it was actually a HSBC MasterCard "under the hood" but branded. The way it worked was, you would pay your expenses on it, then reclaim them from the accounts department, and pay off the card yourself. They would send a copy of the statement to me, and a copy to accounts. The incentive for me to play along with this scheme was zero; I just used my own card so I could collect the airmiles.

Eventually I found out why they did this; so people had no credit history could get a card for work.

Seems to me that joe the plumber dosen't really care that much about privacy nowadays. I don't really see how it could be that harmful, if not for a bit of more targeted advertising. I have the feeling that people would give up a bit of their privacy in exchange of a more comfortable shopping experience, or maybe I'm completely wrong, only time will tell.

Maybe the government will go crazy and you will start plotting a revolution, so you want to purchase stuff without being traced. Checks and balances and all that. You are just using the "I have nothing to hide" fallacy.

see this, for example:

http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html

How about your health insurance company charging you more because of your purchase profile? Or your credit score being affected by which brand of alcohol you prefer?

Or one of the latest bits of news from here in the UK - credit ratings firms checking benefit claimant spending looking for fraud:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10922261

You almost certainly don't need to be committing fraud to attract an investigation and all its hassle.

It's already been used to decline credit to people based on the likes of their shopping preferences. Not necessarily how much they spent and how much they paid off of that, but where they shopped. Whether or not it was justified, I can't tell you. And I am fully aware that tracking history is a vital part of fraud monitoring and determining creditworthiness. But the possibility of abuse beyond the horror of targeted ads is still there, and people can imagine them and they don't like it. I don't like it. I have nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I should condone the excessive information collecting and profiling either.

See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-627&#... and http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/RptCongress/creditca...

tl;dr off the top of my head: Congress/POTUS passed a law last year that included commissioning a report on whether or not creditors were actively profiling, and how far it went. The FRB eventually found that most of the creditors in the US applied this kind of profiling to the majority of CC holders, but only a tiny fraction of a percentage were directly affected by it. It was also pointed out that the use of this information to track things like fraudulent transactions probably outweighed many negatives of tracking this information for other uses as well, so limiting the profiling would probably be a Bad Thing. But they didn't have enough information to determine if this was overall a negative enough to justify restricting it. And that's kinda...scary. They may not do it now, but what's to stop them from doing it in the future without you fully aware of what's going on?

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