MasterCard Is Selling Your Data Just in Time for the Holidays
Credit card companies make money by taking a cut every time you swipe your plastic at the checkout counter. Now MasterCard has found a way to make those swipes pay over and over again.
As the Financial Times first reported, MasterCard is packaging its transaction data — your transaction data — and selling it to advertisers. The story was based on an apparently confidential pitch MasterCard made to potential clients. Not too confidential, because we found a copy by googling it.
In the presentation, “Leveraging MasterCard Data Insights to Reach Holiday Shoppers,” MasterCard senior vice president Susan Grossman describes the many ways the company can mine the 34 billion transactions made using MasterCards every year for data that advertisers can use to target specific audiences.
