Please consider Facebook to Banks: Give Us Your Data, We’ll Give You Our Users.
The social-media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.
Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo, Citigroup Inc., and U.S. Bancorp to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter.
Facebook has talked about a feature that would show its users their checking-account balances, the people said. It has also pitched fraud alerts, some of the people said.
One large U.S. bank pulled away from talks due to privacy concerns, some of the people said.
Facebook has told banks that the additional customer information could be used to offer services that might entice users to spend more time on Messenger, a person familiar with the discussions said. The company is trying to deepen user engagement: Investors shaved more than $120 billion from its market value in one day last month after it said its growth is starting to slow.
Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties.
“We don’t use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads,” said spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana. “We also don’t have special relationships, partnerships, or contracts with banks or credit-card companies to use their customers’ purchase data for ads.”
Banks face pressure to build relationships with big online platforms, which reach billions of users and drive a growing share of commerce. They also are trying to reach more users digitally. Many struggle to gain traction in mobile payments.
Yet banks are hesitant to hand too much control to third-party platforms such as Facebook. They prefer to keep customers on their own websites and apps.
Question of Trust
Any banks that would share such data with Facebook would have to be nuts. I question why such sharing would even be legal.
Meanwhile, Goldman CEO makes this preposterous claim: ‘Banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some social media companies are today’
Bank actions cost tens of thousands of people their houses. Facebook actions were appalling, but banks actions were financially crippling.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
This is all the real-world meaning of Lenin’s famous claim that the capitalist would sell Lenin the noose he’d use to hang the capitalist.
People who own (or are relevant/majority shareholders) or manage large enterprises become extremely wealthy. Extreme wealth generates cognitive pathways that are characterized by a (subconscious) belief in unlimited resources, which in turn creates a belief in Leftist Theology, i.e., that our “Elect” people should act to “make people better” (by stamping out evil in the form of crimethink… such as noticing differences between peoples, between cultures, between those with different ancestors and for noticing that some lifestyles are a really bad choice.)
In other words, consumers/citizens eventually end up paying the very people whose pathological insanity will drive public policies and social fads that harm consumers/citizens. We end up making rich and thus subsidizing the very people who promote sexual deviance, immivasion, export of industry/jobs and who push insanity as a social and legal requirement.
Look at FB use. It is near-literally as stupid as it gets, akin to fueling a gambling, drug or alcohol addiction…and yet people line up like pigs to the slaughter house. We can’t avoid using cell phones that track and store forever our every movement, we can’t avoid using banks that track and sell every aspect of our financial activities, and now most people upload every meaningless detail of their lives to a system that stores, uses and sells it all…the better to enable the greatest asset-stripping system ever imagined.
From universities discovering how to asset-strip a proto-adult’s first 15 years of adulthood to the Medical-Pharma-Insurance Cartel funneling a skyrocketing share of all people’s wealth into its coffers, to the Public Pension Bomb promising to direct taxpayers’ asset values into its maw, Americans are currently being asset-stripped at every point of the compass.
Something’s got to give.
Marc Zuckerberg thinks that people that give him data are “dumb f*cks”…
If you are on Facebook with correct data you are a “dumb f’ck”…
How to LIE by omission:
Facebook“We don’t use purchase data from banks or credit card companies for ads,”
The omission:
They use purchase data they get from payment processors.
Since when did FB (zuck) care about what is legal?
“Yes I agree the banks were majority to blame for the whole thing for making those loans to begin with”
the issue is not the bank lending to those who do not deserve it. They are free to decide whom they want to lend to. THE PROBLEM IS they were not allowed to go bankrupt due to such lending when housing went belly up. Thus the blame lies entirely with the government, credit rating agencies, regulators and the Fed. They need to be skinned alive for screwing up capitalism and infesting it with moral hazard (privatizing profits, socializing losses) and getting away not only scot-free but also beating their chests saying they have saved the system. My fond hope is this skinning will be done at the next bust.
“Bank actions cost tens of thousands of people their houses. Facebook actions were appalling, but banks actions were financially crippling.”
Agreed. Both are fraudsters but with a difference.
Banks have the Fed and the Government to protect them and can thus get away with it. After all, savers, prudent people and retirees are there waiting to be thrown under the bus and tax-payers, the ever ready sitting ducks waiting to be skinned, to foot their bills. The temerity of the authorities to do this with impunity stinks.
Banks sold houses to those who they should not have. To me this is OK provided the rascals had not been bailed out by the Fed and Government (“Bush: ‘I’ve Abandoned Free Market Principles To Save The Free Market System’ – can you make sense of what it means. Beats me!). The other rascals were the regulators and credit rating agencies. That none have gone to jail shows how decadent the system is.
Facebook sells private data. But then it is done with our consent as we are willing to provide it to them. Facebook can be brought down in a day – the day people stop using it and it is unlikely that the Fed will bail it out (but who knows what the Fed will do if it takes the markets and financial system down). Whether people will or will not (stop using facebook) depends on how much they are willing to be product.
What else would the Vampire Squid’s CEO say. America’s largest financial institutions are essentially criminal cartels. Exhibit A being Wells Fargo’s latest 10-Q. Its “legal actions” (see note 13 starting on page 122) reads like a rap sheet that would make even the Mafia blush. Utterly preposterous that this cesspool of of a bank still has a charter to do business.
Facebook and other tech companies have been providing backdoor access to govt for many years, and are just as guilty as banks in destroying this country. Helping govt hunt for taxes, and destroy privacy are common traits of once great societies that have fallen throughout history. Get used to it. As govt’s go further in debt, the more aggressive they become in enforcing their will. Just as anyone that has a bank account in any of the money center banks, if you use Facebook, you are part of the problem.
Why don’t people get paid for furnishing THEIR data to the companies who seem to VALUE it so much?
They don’t get paid because they volunteered to give it away for free. Zuckerberg himself marveled at this in his infamous IM exchange with a friend back in 2004:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb f*cks.
Facebook’s home page should be a still shot from Animal House, where Otter chides Flounder for trusting him.
“Bank actions cost tens of thousands of people their houses”
……technically many of those people who “lost” their houses in the crash never should have been in houses to begin with. They should have stayed renters, and quickly went back to being renters. They put zero down, had horrible credit, and should have stayed renting. And many lied on their loan applications, speculated on investment property, and cashed out all their equity to buy boat boats and RV’s. I never fell too much for the “poor little victim” home owner thing.
Yes I agree the banks were majority to blame for the whole thing for making those loans to begin with, and the ratings companies of course. But I always thought the poor little victim homeowner thing was a bit overplayed and overrated by the media during the GFC. If someone speculates on any other asset with leverage and it crashes in price, no one whines about the ‘poor victims” who lost money.
But yeah I still agree with the main point your post, banks were definitely far worse citizens then social media companies today.
In the last few days the login screen to ebay has changed. You can now login with your Facebook details as well as ebay’s.
Looks like facebook is already into paypal.
With interest rates on the creep… A few things popped into my head. First everything is heading subscription based, and revenue streams are the cream of places like FB, so add revenue is just one stream, well outside of selling your personality, while customizing your advertisements based on who you are, or who they think you are. FB wants a piece of the banking business, pure and simple. They just need to find a way to get it without having to open their own. I notice this with the many institutions who have CC offerings, oh they don’t deal with the banking piece, they just slap their name on the front of the card, they just want sales, to move product. So what exactly does FB want out of this. Well, it’s more likely they want to know how your really spending your money, this could help their add revenue targeting business, as one article I read stated they wanted access to the users banking transactions. My bank sells my mortgage, now that company sells the mortgage info and quicken loans is cold calling me and sending me flyers in the mail and they even know my payment/balance. Their is a way to make this work, they just have to figure it out. I mean .. we know they are not going to use the information the way they say they’re going to, from banks, to social networks, to credit reporting agencies, to the government, have shown that they are perfectly capable of going whoops I guess the hackers took that information from us, or finding some backwards/reverse way of using the information/data.
Wow, banks and Facebook sharing user data…..what could possibly go wrong?