Day: 27 August 2019

Every Credit Card Transaction Leaves a Trail of Data Sharing ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:

I recently used my credit card to buy a banana. Then I tried to figure out how my credit card let companies buy me.

You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank. Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few.

Oh, the places a banana will go in the sprawling card-data economy. Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet — and it’s time that we add privacy, alongside rewards and rates, to how we evaluate them.

All of the possible touch points for a single purchase gives the surveillance economy plenty of opportunity to scoop up whatever information it can without your knowledge or explicit approval. Apple has been touting the privacy advantages of its credit card, but it really only secures two of the six categories identified by Fowler — and that’s fine. That’s about as much as they can possibly control without, as Fowler suggests, using a different card number for every transaction.

All of this is to say that people just aren’t protected from near-constant privacy intrusions. To do so requires a level of awareness bordering on paranoia. It means distancing yourself from the services of anything with an AC adapter. We’re increasingly aware that we live in a world that operates under the assumption that everything that can be tracked — and collected, associated, shared, resold, combined, and kept — ought to be.

Old-Media Celebrities are Vlogging on YouTube ⇥ vice.com

Sophie Kleeman, Vice:

“Am I crazy?” Naomi Campbell asks in her very first vlog. “I’m opening my life to YouTube!” Campbell snaps a movie slate and laughs. She’s wearing an oyster-colored turtleneck sweater. Her hair is long, pin-straight, and parted perfectly down the middle. She sits on a grey couch in what appears to be her home, or at least a very good approximation of what one assumes the home of a brilliant supermodel must look like, with bright pink flowers, gentle lighting, and soft throw pillows.

She’s not crazy. But she’s also not alone. Campbell has joined a growing handful of very famous, very mainstream celebrities who have ventured into the wilds of YouTube, a platform known more than a smidge dismissively for sugary makeup gurus and Casey Neistat, and decidedly more seriously for extremism and the people who weaponize it. But over the past 20 months, Campbell — along with Will Smith, Jack Black, Zac Efron, Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Lopez, Alexa Chung, and Jason Momoa, among others — have ostensibly opened up their lives to the site’s 2 billion monthly users. Others, like prodigal YouTube son Justin Bieber, are working with the company on “top-secret” original content.

This article transported me back to when celebrities first joined Twitter and spoke with fans and followers directly. It brought those celebrities back down to Earth — until, of course, you remembered that most of what gets posted to their account has a full production crew of photographers, makeup artists, technicians, public relations professionals, and social media managers behind it. Even if you know that, though, it still creates an illusion of being more honest than it is, while simultaneously lending YouTube greater legitimacy and prestige.