I felt compelled to join the monzo community to see if others had noticed that, in exchange for using these cashback offers, monzo states thatā¦ (from the terms and conditions)ā¦
We work with partners and merchants to offer you cashback.
We āde-identifyā your information, so our partners wonāt learn your name and full address or any personally identifiable data. To tailor offers to you, weāll share with our partners:
around a yearās worth of your Monzo spending history (physical or virtual cards) and your ongoing spending activity
your age bracket and first half of your postcode
a) this is far from a real process of de-identifying your customers.
b) Is it spending history related to the partner? Or all spending history? Be clear. If itās the latter, this is an insanely large and private quantity of customer data you are providing to partners in exchange for whatever deal youāve brokered.
c) a lot of your customers will make use of this offer without realising they are giving away their private spending history (and supposedly an unknown qualittiy of their future spending history for an unknown amount of timeā¦ Whether āde-identifiedā or not.)
d) when does this partner data sharing occur? When I add a cashback offer and use it? Has it happened already without our consent? I understand you want to make your terms and conditions clear and simple, but this it too simple, there is no real information here to make a determination.
If Iāve misinterpreted these terms and conditions then Iām happy to be corrected. As my understanding stands, this seems like a cynical exchange for monzo to make a shed load of cash by selling valuable, private customer data behind a woefully inadequate anonymising method and poor, vague terms and conditions copy.
Suffice it to say, I wonāt be using these offers.
It also worries me now that Iāve agreed to some other past monzo offer without realising that giving away my private data was buried in the T&Cs somewhere.
I would appreciate knowing what is currently actively happening with my spending history and I would appreciate a setting to toggle any sharing with partners other than monzo itself.
It canāt be only me who has noticed thisā¦