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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

with all of the fintech apps that attach to a card, i wonder if they break down spending categories by vice. how many people paying their dealer or other vice related friends with cashapp, venmo, etc, and then bigData making the connection of what the transactions really were?

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Hey there - founder here. We can indeed break down by payments in these FinTech apps. There are privacy concerns with certain aspects of this, which we of course could not touch. However, measuring the "shadow" economy, of course, serves a legitimate purpose.

you're not doing yourself any favors with the privacy minded folks that think people analyzing the data they did not provide to you directly for that purpose is something to be removed like cancer. but hey, at least you're honest about the granularity of the unintended data you can discern from the data you've purchased about everyday people.

I wasn't quite clear - we don't have access to identifying information in the data (ie. we could measure Venmo but not that John Doe paid $X to Jane Doe at phone number XXX-XXXX)

If you have individual transactions with unique identifiers, that's basically the same thing.

You could probably demo this with a PoC asking the user to provide a sample of their transactions, and then use that to deanonymize the rest of them.

I look at my statements, and each transaction from an app adds enough information to the memo line that I can ID the other user. I’m assuming the data you’ve purchased is “anonymized”, so I don’t know what that line item looks to you. But you still have time stamps and app names. Are you telling me you honestly could not deanonymize. Or are you telling me that you’re just not at this time?

> analyzing the data they did not provide to you directly for that purpose is something to be removed like cancer

For the record, cancer is an appropriate metaphor to describe the data broker industry

Talking to adtech about their products vs criticizing their products is the most illuminating thing a privacy-minded person could do.

The nonsense “we care about privacy” wrappers go away and they start talking product-speak about the details. I don’t think privacy regulations change until adtech product leads get comfortable enough talking publicly about their deadpan views on what they can find out about users.

There used to be a very funny website called Vicemo that would scrape and display (public by default!) Venmo transactions containing certain keywords/emojis

https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/vicemo-collects-all-your-sket...

Yeah interestingly, Venmo makes (or at least used to make) every public transaction available in their API

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