The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
MasterCard has signed a two-year deal to mine Facebook Asia Pacific user data detailing consumers' online habits to uncover behavioural insights it can then sell to the banks.
MasterCard plans to feed the data along with information from other sources into an analytics platform dubbed the Priceless Engine, and work with Australian banks, starting in early 2015, to serve up tailored online offers for MasterCard customers. The aim is to drive online sales.
The company hasn't said how much it will charge the banks for the service, only that they will be offered in four or nine-month "campaigns". Sam Ahmed, group head of marketing for MasterCard in Asia Pacific, said it would "help drive payments" for its banking partners.
I haven't been paying attention to Facebook for quite some time but I thought they promised to only ever supply anonymised data to businesses.
(Score: 1) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:32AM
are as good as the NSA's. Everybody knows that, and has known it for years.
In this day and age, if you do Facebook, you've consciously made the decision to let yourself be profiled by data mining companies for their profit. You can't claim you thought FB's privacy policies are anything other than a joke. Plain and simple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:36AM
If so, should it not be closed and sealed?
(Score: 1) by novak on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:39AM
If you haven't killed your facebook account already, now is a great time to think about why not.
Facebook is a network in which your personal lives are packaged and sold- usually more anonymously than this, but still, sold. If you want to send facebook the message that you won't stand for this sort of thing then the best way to do it is to GTFO. Facebook has a million lobbyists and lawyers working for it, if you really want to stop this sort of data collection the only way to do so is to vote with your feet.
/rant
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:45AM
Nah, you only need to stop posting on FB news on how cheap you managed to buy blue pills.
(damned, any mention of V...gra triggers the lameness filter)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:47AM
I think I'll wait about a year before voting, my feet aren't smelly enough
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:52AM
> if you really want to stop this sort of data collection the only way to do so is to vote with your feet.
It won't make a difference if you just put park your feet on another centralized social network. Social network provides a very useful service, even to basement dwellers with no friends in real life. The problem is the middlemen. We can't expect any significant exodus from facebook and its clones until there is at least workable decentralized alternative. Diaspora was not it, still semi-centralized and barrier to entry was too high. We need something anyone can install on their phones and it "just works" from there on out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @06:57AM
Social network provides a very useful service, even to basement dwellers with no friends in real life.
What service is that, exactly? It always struck me that facebook was most useful to those who had no real lives, since it often devolves into a vanity page of how awesome your life is.
We can't expect any significant exodus from facebook and its clones until there is at least workable decentralized alternative.
Congratulations, you are the problem. By agreeing to data mine your life (and your friends, which is what makes it especially evil) you give them your consent to do whatever they want. They keep stretching the line, and you don't leave. By staying after each continued offense you are voting that they can and should be allowed to continue.
It seems that people, especially in America can't grasp what a complete annihilation of privacy and usurpation of control is happening to them right now. So they'd rather look at what their friends ate last night than stop corporate surveillance in their own home. I have little doubt that we'll get what we want, and what we deserve. Entertainment, and slavery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:02AM
What service is that, exactly?
Ask any grandmother with an account on facebook.
Congratulations, you are the problem.
No, you sir are due the congratulations. Your foot-stamping denial of how normal people live their lives is the mindset that discourages the development of better options. Your perfect kills the good. I myself don't even use social networks, but that's because dealing with smug idiots like yourself has made me into a misanthropist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:18AM
I don't know any grandmothers with facebook accounts. (... because I wasn't on facebook and thus have no friends?)
I'm not denying how normal people live their lives, I'm saying that it is wrong. I'm saying that facebook is an evil and should be treated as such. It's not a good. That's what I want to say. I get that this is unpopular and probably actually quite unreasonable, but I think it's true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:26AM
> It's not a good.
If it didn't provide value people wouldn't use it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:31AM
You don't catch an animal in a trap without bait. Of course there's value. That's totally different from being good.
(Score: 2) by E_NOENT on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:58AM
The www has let us down. I'll bet back in 2000, few of us would have predicted this fate.
Deals like this are tiny tips of the icebergs, when you have stuff like ajax.googleapis.com and addthis.com scripts saturating the webscape.
What a waste.
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:36PM
It had been thought [imdb.com] of. But most people thought it was absurd that privacy could be such an issue, and most of the remainder did not think it was important. Considering the stuff that people put online, I am still unsure if anyone really cares.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:57AM
Just thought the incumbents would put legal pressure on to have this smacked down before it became a multi-billion dollar a year industry. I'm sure dozens to thousands of us nerds thought of doing the exact same thing if we were evil and not worried about the legal consequences. I know it occurred to me quite a few times. But how fucking stupid/complicit would the government and public have to be to allow it? And then 9/11 changed everything. Well insofar as we finally had a metric for just how stupid and complicit the average person was.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:04PM
It's not going back in.
We're past the point where available data mining techniques and computing power are sufficient to mine the firehose of information from "who is doing what on the web" fast enough to create useful profiles of individuals and what they like and don't like.
Data collection has always happened. Facebook is scum, but they're nothing compared to companies you've never heard of like Acxiom. There's a vast market for information about you. Companies will sell the data to the extent it's legally allowed. And to the extent it's not legally allowed, they'll do it in-house and sell the output.
Facebook are terrible people (it's why I don't have a facebook account), but they're not really crossing a line here that dozens of other companies haven't crossed in terms of selling user data at a profit. Hidden marketing cookies (hello, DoubleClick, to name just one) are already trying to do the same.
Can you opt out? Of some of it, yeah. You can disable cookies, use Tor, etc. But to the extent you do business online, or post content online, or communicate online, or do so many of the other things that people like to do online other than just read content, there's data being created, and that data can be collected and sold (and probably is). This pre-dates the web (Axciom has been purchasing data from companies since 1974). But the web is a vast source of information. Heck, you don't even have to do things yourself to get profiled - if you get tagged in enough pictures with person B for someone to infer your friends, they'll make assumptions about you from B's habits, even if you personally leave no other trail.
Eric Schmitt was right - privacy is dead. [marketwatch.com]
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:05PM
I know this one site, SoylentNews, that has a reasonable privacy policy. It doesn't use ads, google analytics, and you don't even need JavaScript to actually use it. It won't log your IP (unless you're an editor, for accountability). It has a very nice comunity and quality dicussions most of the time.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:52PM
How profitable is it?
Ncommander doesn't want to make money out of it, but that's the exception.
There's gotta be a way I can monetize grandma so I can afford the 1100m2 house overlooking the rest of the scum.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:00PM
Oh, right, also on the threat list that's more than just browser cookies - PayPal (or other transaction providers) selling data on who you purchase from/donate to....
The list goes on.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:58PM
Things NCommander doesn't control:
* ISP's selling [seekingalpha.com] your clickstream data [wanderingstan.com] to anyone who wants it.
* Third parties like Facebook [firstpost.com] having the ability to track you uniquely across websites they don't even control
* Someone using stylometry [33bits.org] to compare your posting here to other writing you do that IS linked to you uniquely
* Browser toolbars, adware, and other tools running on your machine that are tracking and reporting your internet usage.
Yes, this is one of the safer sites on the internet. And the specific Facebook tracking referenced in the article above probably IS thwarted by the methodologies on this site (though I've yet to be convinced that there aren't similar tracking that might work). And stylometry is (AFAIK) not "prime time" yet as a de-anonmyzation tool, certainly not at scale.
But it's dangerous to assume the only threats you need to be wary of are related to the intent of the owner of the site you're viewing.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:30PM
Hey thanks, MrGuy, that's plenty useful. Wasn't actually aware of these. Thanks for the references.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:11PM
Privacy policy where? I'm still not seeing one, and it is the reason I am still an AC, despite following this site since Day 1.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @06:49PM
While I don't trust privacy policies, since they're not legally binding in the US, this site has no privacy policy. See this:
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/TodoList [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:22PM
I guess it is time to poison that well some more. Facebook already thinks I am an unmarried Jew living in Eilat but I guess that isn't enough. I do need to be more diligent about random tagging on Facebook as well.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:08PM
Selling your body to the conglomerate: $10 bucks an hour
Selling your data to the conglomerate: $15 bucks a year
Freedom from Big Brother: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy.
For everything else, there's MasterCard.
(Chrome just corrected Mastercard to MasterCard. Figures.)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!