5 thoughts on “Is this a good time to reveal credit card terms?”

1. … this amounts to inten­tional obfus­ca­tion and hid­ing of cru­cial infor­ma­tion, cou­pled with a big set of sim­ple con­tin­gent reac­tions to protest.

   This seems like a good descrip­tion of a lot of things, actu­ally — not just credit card com­pany cus­tomer ser­vice practices.

   In all seri­ous­ness: maybe you’d be will­ing muse, sep­a­rately, on what an accept­able level of anonymity would be. Would it be enough to sim­ply auto-​​assign anony­mous IDs to sub­mit­ters, around which data could be aggre­gated (this will fail to work beyond a cer­tain point; cf. the Yahoo “anonymized” search data scan­dal from a few years ago). Or do you want to enforce a cer­tain level of dis­ag­gre­ga­tion in the way that the data is stored?

   A bet­ter way to put it would be: assume that the thing you want to pre­vent is the “de-​​anonymization” of the data — the abil­ity for “some­one” to be able to take the data, and deter­mine whose data went into it in the first place. Do you want the “some­one” in that sen­tence to be any­one (any­one off the street, with no spe­cial knowl­edge except pub­lic knowl­edge)? Do you want it to include the credit card com­pa­nies them­selves? The admin­is­tra­tor of the data­base (assum­ing the data­base only makes a sub­set, or an aggre­gate, of the avail­able data “public”)?

   What kind of anonymity are you think­ing of, specifically?

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2. Good ques­tion.

   There are a cou­ple of answers, of course. If any­body did any­thing in real life, they’d need to be aware of both Amer­i­can and inter­na­tional pri­vacy laws. In par­tic­u­lar, Euro­pean law is dra­con­ian when it comes to this sort of thing.

   So past that point, we need to ensure there’s enough infor­ma­tion to be use­ful for min­ing. I don’t really care if peo­ple know my name and how much I owe on my credit cards. I’d be happy to see daily bal­ance infor­ma­tion, though it would prob­a­bly be more likely it’d be up to date if there were an API scrap­ing my actual card bal­ances (shyeah, right). I per­son­ally would be happy to enter, say, weekly bal­ance info.

   I sus­pect the insid­i­ous pri­vacy prob­lem would come if one entered mer­chant info, or more detailed receipt data. Pat­tie Maes notwith­stand­ing, I’d rather not have tar­geted adver­tis­ers and search engine opti­miz­ers min­ing me from my own effort to mine them.

   If we’re try­ing to recre­ate card providers’ sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of us, I sup­pose that (hope­fully) they don’t have access to a lot of bank info, like bal­ances. But they would have info on credit report con­tents. That would raise ques­tions of reverse-​​engineering, too.

   So to sum­ma­rize, the rev­e­la­tion of details wouldn’t bug me inso­far as they couldn’t be used to tar­get or dis­crim­i­nate me by the peo­ple whose busi­ness logic I myself am try­ing to glean

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3. I don’t know why I keep writ­ing “Yahoo search data,” when of course I mean the AOL Search Data scan­dal. Maybe my brain has done a global search for “semi-​​competent inter­net com­pany,” and replaced all occur­rences of AOL with Yahoo. Out with the old, in with the new…

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4. It would be fun to engi­neer a scheme that made it easy for folks to sub­mit scans of terms and con­di­tions to a cen­tral hub. Folks need help play­ing these games .

   There are exist­ing venues where this stuff gets some atten­tion. Shop­ping sites mostly. For exam­ple What I like about such places you they attract a com­mu­nity of peo­ple who are enjoy play­ing the games and assem­bling the catalogs .

   I’d per­son­ally pre­fer that these things be addressed with reg­u­la­tion rather than clubs of tal­ented hob­bists, but we do with what we’ve got.

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5. Fac­tor­ing in the Yahoo epi­demi­ol­ogy study vs. the Google epi­demi­ol­ogy study.

   In the end, it all aver­ages out.

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