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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

My favorite visa data to sell/buy is airfares. Visa gets the airport code of your departure and arrival, so you can group people into like “visiting Florida during the first week of June”. Or “flys to the Bahamas very often”.

Good stuff.

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What kind of individual data is in that set of “flys to the Bahamas very often”? Zip codes? Closest city?

I guess if it's anonymized they just want to find patterns. So if 70% of men aged 40-65 who "flies to the Bahamas often" also like to eat at the local 5-star restaurant there, they can go to that restaurant and tell them to either join the Visa Perks experience to reach the other 30%, or maybe tell them to put out ads at the airport. You can even tell them which months these visitors like to come, so you can time those ads...

Not sure what you meant, but you buy data like that based on airport codes, dates, frequency, and tier (like top 10% of spenders). I’ve only used visa data for targeted advertising. Like tourism destinations target people who are flying to their destination in the near future.

What data do you get on each person who matches the query?

Often you get the data in aggregate, bought and sold as an “audience”. It’s a Boolean flag if a person in the audience. Basically an array of IDs for people in the audience (true). Almost always the data seller masks the ID of people in the audience to the buyer. This then creates opportunity for third party “matching services” or “identity resolution” who can de-anonymize, link, and re-anonymize. Link audiences together, e.g. flies to Bahamas often AND lives in the US North East AND has a mortgage. Facebook and Google’s success relies heavily on simplifying huge amounts of the programmatic advertising backend, but the audience selling is still a huge part of the industry, like Acxiom et al.

Much of this buying and selling of data within the paid advertising industry hides in plain sight because it goes by so many names - contextual targeting, relevancy data, media enrichment, lead enhancement, blah blah blah...

This is correct. I worked at oracle, who is the go between for advertisers/agencies and vendors like visa who sell data but don’t do the “client facing” kind of stuff.

Aren’t Oracle (and Salesforce) currently dealing with a class action suit in Europe because of these services?

If oracle isn’t getting sued, they’re not doing business the oracle way. Unrelated, I no longer work there.

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