Commentary

Keeping Your Identify in Your Purse

Lost in all the run-up hype of the Super Bowl and the Olympics (they are the winter games right?) was this little announcement that MasterCard and American Express are in the marketplace selling data collected from their networks of consumer transactions. Every time one of their combined 350 million cards is swiped they collect data, which they combine with other third-party data to give marketers insight into consumer behavior.

This is not online behavior. These are in-store transactions, but they are intended to provide the same kind of consumer profiles that internet ad targeting already does. But with one little difference: your name is on the credit/debit cards and your home address is on your billing statement. And dontcha think that purchase histories that go back eons are every bit indicative of who you REALLY are as search data? The kind that AOL released and it took a couple of reporters but a few days to deduce who an individual was? So where's the outrage? Where is some southern congressman stepping up to sponsor privacy legislation to "protect" consumers from their credit card companies? Where are the FTC hearings and the privacy wonks to prod the hearings along?

I feel like I have written this column four or five times in the past 10 years, but it is worth repeating that your privacy is in far greater danger offline than it is online. Private investigators earn their livings dumpster diving through the financial statements and invoices and phone records you fail to shred. You know those loyalty programs you join at retailers in your hometown; they are nothing but giant data collections that tie you (not someone, but YOU) to your purchase habits. Security cameras are now taking your picture at a growing number of locations around the world. Pretty soon that sexy pair of undies won't be a secret to airport screeners. I could go on, but you get the drift.

It is indeed a little scary to know that just as your broadband connection uplinks you to the wide world of the Internet, the whole wide world -- hackers and all -- use that same link to peek inside your computer (I hope they like my collection of naked supermodels). But you can minimize the potential compromise by keeping sensitive documents off your hard drive, using a good virus protection program (I like the free AVG version), keeping your firewall current (and ON) and using something other than "birthday" as your online banking password.

And for crying out loud, stop worrying about tracking pixels. The doomsday scenarios painted by those who don't like them are truly unlikely to occur since it is not in the interest of the tracking companies to cooperate and produce a collective pixel picture of you. And they work hard to anonymize the data they do collect.

Now, go write your congressman about your credit cards. If for no other reason, to protest the usurious interest rates they now charge.

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