Hey everyone,
I was just wondering if anyone else here used Airtime Rewards?
You link your card to the app and it pays you cash back at certain retailers in the form of credit on your bill. It’s not loads but I’ve had £10 back over six months but I live alone so you’d obviously get more if you have partner/family.
I know obviously I’m giving up some of my data but I’ll take it for the 1% back on my Waitrose shop 
Matt
Never heard of it but sounds interesting!
Sounds like an interesting proposition.
What retailers are supported? It’d be good to know this without having to sign up first.
There’s not a tonne of retailers but they are…
Waitrose - 1% (Although June is 6% if you spend over £20)
MAC - 5%
Jack Wills - 5%
Byron - 3%
Evans Cycles - 2%
David Clulow (Glasses) - 5%
Oliver Bonas - 4%
Blue Inc - 10%
American Golf - 5%
Jamie’s Italian - 5%
QPark - 2%
Office Outlet - 5%
Forever 21 - 5%
Spaghetti House - 4%
Prezzo - 3%
Carbon - 2%
Heals - 3%
Tile Giant - 2%
Officers Club - 10%
Bout Avenue - 15%
SCS Furniture - 3%
Butlins - 2%
Barrhead Travel - 2%
Misguided - 10%
Pure Pet Food - 5%
ATG Tickets - 4%
P&O Ferries - 5%
Groupon - 3%
Thanks for that! 
Sadly no Amex and no payments via Apple Pay/Android Pay. (At least for Waitrose, Byron and ATG, which are the ones I bothered checking).
I have been using this for some time. Saved about £15 off my O2 airtime. Its not bad but most high street retailers are not there.
Yeah it’s not the greatest, in fairness nearly all my rewards are from Waitrose because I have their credit card so it’s kinda like a double “reward”.
Cheers for posting that list. Not a single retailer I use 
They’ll be disclosing your transaction history to network providers, who have a known history of zero concerns as far as security is concerned. What could go wrong? 
Ha yeah I know obviously lots of people wouldn’t be comfortable with this but my card statement is literally Starbucks and Waitrose 
Honestly it’s not even about the transactions themselves - individually they’re worthless - the problem appears when you get all the metadata associated with the transactions (date & time, transaction location) coupled with the metadata the mobile carrier has (continuous location updates from your phone, sites visited, etc) that makes it dangerous.
Finally who do you think pays for this? Do you really think the mobile carriers/scammers will happily give you a rebate off your bill out of the blue? The only reason they’re doing that is because there’s someone behind the scenes who’s happy to pay more for this bag of data, and they wouldn’t be doing so if it was worthless.
The main problem is also that you don’t have a way to opt-out - even if your carrier stops providing them new info (which is a long shot by itself), there’s just no way the marketing/scamming partners behind the scenes will pass that opt-out instruction along. Why would they, considering it will make all their data worthless? Not to mention, there is no traceability as to where that data has made its way, so they will not even be able to pass the opt-out along even if they wanted to.
I do understand how this works. I know they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their heart but at the same time I’m not really thinking there’s some evil plan running in the background. I guess I just don’t really get too concerned about my data as I don’t think I’m that interesting. What are they going to do with it?
What are they going to do with it?
Sell it to the highest bidder, after which all bets are off. Some will use it to spam you. Google and Facebook will no doubt buy a copy to be able to serve you “better” ads. Some insurance/healthcare providers can also buy a copy to determine how much of a risk you are and influence your rates accordingly. The possibilities are endless - anyone can buy this data.
If I spent my entire life worrying about this sort of thing happening I’d never use my debit/credit card for anything and cut up all the loyalty cards I have. I honestly do see where you’re coming from but I guess my opinion is I’m not going to go through life worrying about what companies are going to do with my data as they’ve probably already got a tonne of it.
cut up all the loyalty cards I have
Not a bad idea. 
they’ve probably already got a tonne of it.
Sadly true but doesn’t mean you should just sit there and do nothing. Some services like debit cards are unavoidable, but is giving scammers a treasure trove of data for a few quid a month really worth it?
While some of those concerns are legitimate, I feel this is a bit much in the tin foil hat zone…
Do you not think you’re assuming a little that all companies have evil intentions and you’re suggesting because I use this app I’m 100% going to be scammed?
I agree with you I have a higher risk of being targeted for things like adverts and possibly spam but the rest I think you’re overthinking. But I understand everyone has their own views etc.
all companies have evil intentions
Not all, I mean I think at least some of them are still fine. My water company isn’t (yet) putting tracking chemicals in the water they serve me to figure out where I go. 
But mobile companies are a lost cause IMO. Just recently there was a big backlash where it was revealed that major US mobile carriers have been selling precise location data of all their customers (so not an opt-in thing at all) to some shady marketing company (and nobody knows where it could’ve gone from there). Before that, there was an issue where a carrier was embedding a permanent cookie at the network level to allow companies to track their users without them being able to easily opt-out (clearing cookies on your device won’t do it).
After all of this, do you still think there’s any reason to trust this industry at all?