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PSA: Citi cards updated marketing policy. Limit your sharing!
December 21, 2019 at
01:36 PM
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Last Edited by Phaenon December 21, 2019 at 07:36 PM
Call 1-866-217-4736 from a registered phone and limit Citi selling your information to third parties!
This applies to all Citi cards including cards like Costco issued by Citi.
Remember to ask for a written confirmation in the automated system at the end.
If you don't understand why this is important read the NYT article or below:
https://www.theverge.co
There are massive data aggregation companies like Factual and Roam. They pay money to apps to give people your location history and build your profile.
They then buy information from financial institutions to tie it to the places you visited
Then they buy information and match up financial transaction time stamps to anonymized store purchase data (from like free rewards cards) to figure out what you bought.
They also then collect public information about you on age, and other demographics
Then they sell all of this as a package to anyone who will pay for it.
update: for those of you who asked about Chase, you must call: 1-888-868-8618. It requires more information than the Citi system when asked if you are a resident of CA, just say yes and limit additional sharing!
Amex: 1- 855-297-7748
This applies to all Citi cards including cards like Costco issued by Citi.
Remember to ask for a written confirmation in the automated system at the end.
If you don't understand why this is important read the NYT article or below:
https://www.theverge.co
There are massive data aggregation companies like Factual and Roam. They pay money to apps to give people your location history and build your profile.
They then buy information from financial institutions to tie it to the places you visited
Then they buy information and match up financial transaction time stamps to anonymized store purchase data (from like free rewards cards) to figure out what you bought.
They also then collect public information about you on age, and other demographics
Then they sell all of this as a package to anyone who will pay for it.
update: for those of you who asked about Chase, you must call: 1-888-868-8618. It requires more information than the Citi system when asked if you are a resident of CA, just say yes and limit additional sharing!
Amex: 1- 855-297-7748
These responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser.
Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser.
It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, airline or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.
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When I try to submit the form to get my report, it keeps telling me to complete the captcha even though I get a green check mark next to it before clicking submit
To anyone wondering about the process:
- It's call automated (no need to wait for a rep)
- You call, press 1 for English, etc.
- Enter the last 4 numbers of the Citi card in question
- (I think a question confirm you want to proceed with limiting the data sharing)
- 3 questions asking if you want to limit sharing. If you want to limit all 3, just press 1 when she starts saying "If you want to limit..."
- A fourth question asking if you want a written confirmation (press 1)
Once done, if you have another Citi card it will ask you to enter the full card number to do that one. I found it easier (and arguably safer) to just call back and enter the last 4 of the other card.
Thank you for the detailed steps. One addition is Enter your zip code after you enter the last 4 digits of your card.
I'm amazed at how people flip out over credit card privacy (what you buy), yet most people could care less about their internet devices. From cell phones and computers, to Roku's and FireSticks. I'm not even sure if you can opt out on chromecast, but what's google going to learn that they don't already know?
Web surfing devices know not only what you buy online, but literally every aspect of your life. From constant GPS locations on your phones (and static location on others), your demographics, and well, everything else you do online since this is way too long to list.
ROKU:
Recently Roku announced to stockholders, that they make >$92/yr per user by selling their info. Including app usage histories, browsing history, demographics, cut of the commercials, emails, and any other info they collect about you. The device is constantly sending info to Facebook, AMZN, Netflix, Google, and others, even if you've never had an account and never installed the apps. He stated that the devices themselves aren't profitable, and they'd have to shut down if they didn't sell user data.
Roku Continued:
Roku used to have very limited info that the user entered. Then after an OS update fairly recently, which blocked you from using the device until you filled out the info. They required lots of user info including name, email, gender, etc., even having you enter your CC, and subsequently tricked many people into thinking they had to buy Roku TV channel packages. There are guides online how to bypass the CC info, and get past all the Paid channel packages, but not past any of the info above. What's worse, is that if you had a Roku TV, it was completely disabled until you entered the info. That meant not even watching regular TV, since Roku was the OS on the smart TV.
Everything Else:
This shouldn't be surprising though. 1) Because of what we know of the internet. 2) Smart TV's in general are $200-$300 cheaper than they should be, as they're subsidized by the companies as they expect to make this up from selling your data. Including your app usage, TV/streaming show viewing history, and taking a cut of commercials in their free streaming TV apps, like with Vizio providing Pluto TV for free.
I honestly used to not care about any of this stuff, until I found out just how detailed it was, and that it's often sold to anyone willing to pay. Now I immediately disable privacy settings on Fire Stick, new phones, windows, etc. Even disabling the WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS scanning on my phone, that occurs even when you have these turned off, and don't realize it's even happening (It's pretty deep into the Android settings, and not that easy to find.) And resetting my Google and Samsung advertising ID's at least weekly, and clearing cookies, etc.
That's not even counting that your call logs, full texts, tower triangulation, gps, DNS Logs (similar to your browser history, but for every single site, app, and file your phone requests), etc. All being stored in warehouses of servers hosted by the phone companies, and sold (sorta mandatory) to the US Gov't for access to the archived info. As well as much of this being sold to 3rd parties. You can avoid the internet part by using a VPN, including those letters many of you have gotten for downloading pirated content. You get the side benefit of cell carriers not being able to throttle your video resolution. You can also use a free DNS like Cloudflare, which will make your web browsing faster than your cell carrier/ISP's default DNS. DNS will only block the logs, so they won't be able to see the file names/web addresses, but your cell carrier/ISP will still see the metadata of the files you download. DNS is almost always included in your VPN app as well.
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