MasterCard Transactions To Be Mined For CO2 Data 124
seamus1abshere writes "In the latest twist from Big Data, MasterCard and Brighter Planet today announced that cardholder transaction data will be mined for clues about CO2 emissions. Initial coverage will be of flights, car rentals, hotels and other purchases for which the credit card company stores extra metadata. Interestingly, the science behind the offering is all open source."
Privacy (Score:0, Informative)
The same people that invented a constitutional right to privacy in order to justify abortion now want your credit card usage info to condemn you for global warming. Consistency would be super.
As usual... (Score:5, Informative)
Summary written by a troll.
Press release is about business services. They are releasing a service to help business track their travel expenditures. RTFA if you want the real story.
Cut off comment lines?? (Score:5, Informative)
Is it just me or is the text on most comments cut off to the top half? I tried with Firefox, Chrome, and IE and it's the same with all of them...
Not a privacy invasion, Ignore the trolls and RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA: "a new program to help make travel carbon emissions analysis easier ... for the businesses worldwide that use MasterCard corporate cards ... to help businesses more efficiently manage their corporate card programs and meet current and future analytical needs"
This is a program that companies can sign up for, in which Mastercard will help them analyze their corporate travel programs. Al Gore isn't digging through your receipts at the sex toy shop. Ignore all the Republican trolls.
Re:Oh, sure. (Score:5, Informative)
The short answer is that data is somewhat compartmentalized by department. Each CC transaction first comes through the mainframes, which are very restricted, mostly just for IT. That data is fed nightly to the data warehouse (basically one massive database). A lot of IT get direct access as needed. Some business / reporting applications are then written to query directly from it, limited to the departments that would require it. Any department which needs aggregate data has separate database servers, with data warehouse IT staff facilitating the automatic feed and aggregation of the data.
Requests for data from outside the company are taken case-by-case. So, for example, when I had to write reports for a particular bank (a Mastercard member), I was careful to only pull that bank's data. I didn't filter anything that was specific to their cardholders. For applications which got aggregate data, individual transactions and CC-specific data was never sent to the application's database servers. It was carefully aggregated first at the warehouse, then transmitted. I have to say there wasn't much general oversight, but it's simply enforced by management throughout the company.