Credit Cards: The Pocket Snitch

I once heard that in France they have a saying that if you want to find the scandal with a politician, you should, “Follow the women” , in the States we’d more likely say, “Follow the money”. Setting aside the indications about what is important to each culture’s men, this creates a telling situation about how people go about investigating each other.

When I was younger I took quite readily to credit cards. I enjoyed the ability to spend when I wanted to (a habit it appears our culture has embraced somewhat zealously) while being free from the potential of a lost wallet (to forgetfulness or robbery). What I never considered was what I was giving up for this convenience. For me, my fiscal responsibility kept the dangers of credit card debt from ever becoming the problem it is for most folks in the United States today, but the tracking capabilities are quite real.

For the moment I’m going to set aside the financial implications of someone adding a 2-5% fee on every transaction and how that can raise prices for consumers; I’m going to focus mostly on the privacy implications. Just think about your credit card bill; every month you get a nice list of where you were with locations, dates times and even how much you spent. Looking at these records over time and you get a view of what a person’s life is like. Indeed, advice given to those concerned about stalking advises them not to use credit cards because of their traceability. In many cases, most of us aren’t being stalked by anyone more sinister than marketers and some might reasonably ask, “I’m not worried about staking, why should I care?” The answer is that this valuable form of data aggregation is not only used by marketers and stalkers, but also by law enforcement and governments to spy on their populations. Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, give the US government the ability to look at 3rd party holders of a person’s information (like an email provider or a financial institution). Of course the US government has been monitoring financial transactions of a certain size ($10,000 or greater) for a while though FinCEN. What the USA PATRIOT Act did was increase the ability for the government to get access to these records (and without your knowledge).

From a privacy perspective, it is the potential of abuse of this data that is most concerning. Where you eat and shop, what organizations you donate to and you personal habits are all contained in the records created by these little cards. Cash, on the other hand, “tells no tales and leave no trails”; or so you might think. At least here in the states this is true, though other parts of the world are experimenting with traceable money under the auspices of currency protection.

The bottom line is that money the base unit of transactions in our world. Because of this, the ability to see how a person spends their money tells you a lot about who they are, we need to be careful about who we give this information to. Some people, like Jerry Springer, find out the hard way that financial records can tell tales they would rather not have told (Jerry was caught using a personal check at a house of ill repute while he was a Cincinnati city council member). Both the appearance of data, and it’s absence are things some might be concerned about (if you eat lunch every Saturday at the local pizzeria and one Saturday you don’t eat there, someone might wonder what caused the change in circumstances (especially if an investigations is ongoing about an occurrence on that date)). So the next time you reach for the plastic, just remember that you’re checking your privacy at the counter.