Posts Tagged ‘privacy’

What’s your consumer label?

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

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(credit: Marketplace)

Labels: not just for food anymore. Companies have to organize their customers somehow – otherwise they’d be marketing denture cream to 8-year-olds and tampons to middle-aged men. Are you a High Rise Renter? Part of Main Street USA? Live in a college dorm? There’s a label for that.

How do they do it? Well they used to just make their best guess about who was watching a given channel at a given hour (guess who was watching Oprah at 4pm every day?) and tailor their advertising appropriately. But now marketers have all sorts of information about us. From online profiles to credit card transactions to Google searches and Foursquare check-ins, everyone with some kind of connection to the outside world is pretty much leaving a trail of data every where they go.

So – surprise! – a huge industry has sprung up to collect and analyze this data (called “data mining”) and sell it to the companies that want to sell you stuff. You can read all about it here, and “identify your lifestyle category” here.

Internet Browsing Taken To A Personal Level

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

A company called [x+1] Inc. is making strides towards the destruction of anonymity on the Web.

  • [x+1] Inc. collects data from users and sells it to companies that use the information that then targets products to specific customers.
  • According to a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal, [x+1] Inc.’s data is not always completely accurate, but it was able to find out quite a bit of information about the test users, including where they lived.
  • Although this is a troubling infringement of privacy on its own, there is an added threat: the more bits of information a program or company gathers on you, the easier it becomes to narrow you down to a specific person, destroying your anonymity entirely.

Facts & Figures

  • Clients pay from $30,000-$200,000 per month for [x+1] Inc.’s services.
  • According to [x+1] Inc., the company is capable of absorbing thousands of details about a user in just a fifth of a second.
  • 33 “bits” of information are required to accurately determine a person’s identity, where each piece of information is assigned a value in “bits” (your gender is worth just one bit, your ZIP code or birthdate many more). [x+1] Inc.’s analysis of one of the WSJ’s test users yielded 26.5 bits, or enough to narrow his identity down to one of 64 people in the entire world.

Best Quote

“We never don’t know anything about someone.” –John Nardone, chief executive, [x+1] Inc.

Who’s looking at your trades?

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

This is a somewhat complicated question that depends largely on the situation you find yourself in. Much like the stock market or investment markets themselves, certain people are privy to certain types of information. But let’s say you bought a share of Microsoft (MSFT) yesterday. Who can see that you did that?

  1. On the most immediate level, you can. You can view your purchase in your account register.
  2. Your financial advisor or private banker can also see the trade because she or he has access to your account.
  3. Things start to get a bit impersonal here: theoretically, the bank or brokerage house that you are associated with can see that one more share of Microsoft was bought for one of their customers.
  4. The market will most likely not be affected with the purchase of your one share, but since it is technically the most recent sale, for a little while (we’re talking less than a second) your purchase will be the last visible sale of MSFT which is visible to anyone who is looking at MSFT at that moment.

The long and the short of it is that only you and your financial advisor/ institution can see that YOU personally bought a share of MSFT; the rest of the world can only see that one share of MSFT was bought by someone, somewhere. The identity of the purchaser is confidential information.

Today in Apple Uncool

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Apple’s new Privacy Policy (which you’re required to agree to in order to download anything – including apps – from iTunes) has some spy vs. spy stuff going on. The policy basically says that Apple is allowed to anonymously track and store every single move your iGadget makes – in other words, every move you make. Since no one actually reads the updated Privacy Policies, we thought we’d share the creepy new world of iSurveillance for you lucky iUsers out there!

Here’s the part in the new policy that talks about it:

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(via consumerist.com)

Can anybody look at your credit score?

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

While your nosy neighbor isn’t allowed to look up your credit score, almost any business with a legitimate purpose can. So what makes a credit inquiry legitimate as opposed to a neighbor’s snooping?

The rules that govern who can look at your scores are spelled out clearly in the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Someone who wants to see your score must have an acceptable business or financial reason to do so. People who are evaluating whether you qualify for credit cards, loans, insurance policies, jobs, or housing rentals all have a “legitimate” reason for looking at your credit score. For those situations, a credit score is vital in determining whether you are a good candidate or not – their businesses depend on this information to know you are consistent, trustworthy, and dependable with money. What this means is that any company that stands to gain from looking at your score is entitled to do so.

In most of these situations, though, a person must first authorize the company to obtain their credit score. If you don’t want your loan adviser to look at your credit score, then he won’t be able to. The only caveat is that if you refuse, you probably won’t be getting that loan…

Why do people have bank accounts in Switzerland?

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Swiss bank accounts are world-renowned for their security, but it’s a different kind of security than what you’d see in a heist movie. The protection that applies here has nothing to do with maximum-security vaults and armed guards giving body checks; it’s about the unique privacy provided by Swiss banking law.

Most of the perks of having a Swiss bank account come from the fact that, under Swiss law, no banker can reveal anything about your account (including its existence) to anyone else without your permission. Any banker who violates this agreement is prosecuted by the state and can face fines and jail time. So once you put money in a Swiss bank account, the only people who know that money even exists are you and your banker.

Why is this anonymity so desirable? Some people just want privacy and believe that their financial situation is their own business. Others, however, try to hide their financial information from the government to avoid higher taxes. This is called tax evasion and it’s illegal. When the government tries to figure out how much money to tax you, it first needs to know how much you have. Generally, the more you have, the more taxes you pay. When the government can’t see the money you have in a Swiss bank account, they can’t include it when they calculate your taxes and you end up getting taxed for less than you’re actually worth.

Swiss banks are so popular – and so notorious – not for their physical security systems, but for the anonymity they provide to their clients. Just remember, if you live in a country like the U.S., you need to report how much money you have in a Swiss bank account to avoid getting in trouble.