This Is How Your Financial Data Is Being Used to Serve You Ads

Everyone in advertising is buying exhaustive records of your purchases -- all your purchases -- and comparing them to your viewing habits so that they know which ads you saw and whether or not they changed your behavior. All of your financial information is for sale.

Here's how it's collected:

• When you shop frequently at a store, you get a points card so that you can get a discount or coupons. Stores give these away like they're going out of style, ostensibly to reward loyalty -- Kmart, Walmart, Target, Walgreens and CVS all do this.
• Two main companies, Acxiom and Experian, collect this data, among other data sets.
• The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 in particular is why companies like Acxiom, Experian, and other data brokers (and the companies that use data brokers) are skittish about publicity -- the clauses that allow the use of this data are designed to expressly forbid the direct identification of anybody involved.
• So data brokers tip-toe right up to the edge of that line—they whitelist everything they have, meaning that they strip out names and addresses except for the ZIP +4 code (you know, 55555-5555, instead of just 55555.
• Well, you probably bought all that stuff with a credit card, and there's a company called Argus that one data company executive said provides "the majority of credit card transactions" to them for the same purposes.