Here is a graphic from The Wall Street Journal Online that shows how your credit card usage can lead to a targeted ad online.
I really like targeted advertising because it should be more effective for the advertiser and, within reason, more relevant to consumers. Most often that sounds like a win/win.
But occasionally I think we might be getting too good at it. From the WSJ article:
The technology is still evolving. According to ad executives briefed on some of the ideas, a holy grail would be to show, for instance, a weight-loss ad to a person who just swiped their card at a fast-food chain—then track whether that person bought the advertised products. Currently, Web ads generally are based on a person’s online behavior but not information tied to his or her identity or activities in the brick-and-mortar world.
Or later in the article they say:
According a Visa patent application published in April, the company sees potential to use a wide array of personal details to create profiles that could be used for ad targeting well beyond shopping details. It describes the possibility of also using “information from social network websites, information from credit bureaus, information from search engines, information about insurance claims, information from DNA databanks,” and other sources.
Linking data from DNA databanks? That’s scary.
The good news is that they are a long away from being able to do this and, most importantly, currently the rule is that consumers must opt-in to allow Visa and other credit card companies the licence to do this. If they asked me, I would not opt-in.
Geo-coding is more than enough.