Visa, one of the world’s two largest payment card services, is launching new, proprietary technology that will allow it to give retailers even more data collected from its customers.
The move is seen as Visa working hard to keep up competing with the other giant – Mastercard – but also, fintech firms like Plaid.
The latter’s business, in terms of Visa considering it a rival, is revealing: it’s to power fintech and associated products with a data transfer network – specifically, a platform that “enables applications to connect with [a] user’s bank account.”
Visa’s “fear of missing out” on another lucrative personal data and customer behavior-based money grab is taking the form of “tokens” which allow banks and merchants to communicate so that banks can share customer data that offers insight into their preferences based on past transactions.
Reports say that this requires customers’ consent – but then also quote Visa Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney as saying, “It’s almost entirely blind to almost all consumers. They just know their payments work better.”
McInerney came up with a brand new way to phrase “opt-out” – he said the tokens come with consent “as the foundational premise.” The visa exec brazenly referred to this as “putting [the] customer in control”:
“Consumers will have the option, through their bank app, to revoke access to their information.”
Visa’s clearly banking – pun intended – on their customers accepting a “mirrors for gold” type of deal – giving up their valuable and sensitive personal information opted-in by default, while poorly if at all aware of its worth, in exchange for a “shiny object” – in this case, a little more convenience.
And while this angle may at this point be lost on most people, Visa and its ilk seem to be counting on just that.
“Better shopping experience” is how Visa phrases it. Some type of AI (one ventures to guess, machine learning) is involved in the closed-source software now rolled out that has access to huge personal information datasets of the kind Visa has.
Visa users might like to know that the “new sharing of shopping data through tokens” will debut as a pilot at an as yet unspecified date “later this year.”
Why do people not seem to understand this is primary for price fixing scams and information filtering. Like seriously, that is fundamental to Amazon. The obscure overlapping product categories, multiple products inside a single listing, and multiple sellers per listing; all of that nonsense would make an impossible to manage back end for real logistics. Every single part of that is a price fixing scam.
Every time you see someone show a google search on YT or in a blog, try and replicate their search results. If someone bribes Google, your search results will show all irrelevant or misdirected results and the advertiser's results will be all that you see. In many cases, the advertiser is not even relevant to your query. The real results are not on any of the following pages either. This is the easy one to verify. The same thing is happening in all aspects of life that are not easily verified.
Selling digital data is a form of slavery. Your digital presence is a fundamental part of your person no different than an arm or a leg. There is no such thing as anonymous data. This is theft of autonomy. Autonomy is a cornerstone of citizenship and democracy with self determination.
These are criminal actions to steal a part of a person for manipulation and thievery.