I should probably kick this off by saying that I’ve had a read through the mondo Privacy Policy - which, kudos is a good understandble clear document.
Two bits give me pause though:
Use of personal information
We process personal information for the purposes of:
…
5. providing you with information, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes.
and
Marketing
We may use and disclose information in aggregate (so that no individuals are identified) for marketing and strategic development purposes.
Whilst I love the idea of my banking becoming as usable as the my web infrastructure… I do fear a kind of ‘facebook-isation’ of my bank statement, where either individually or even aggregate (the difference seems that I’m followed around the internet by lamp adverts because I either bought one recently or people my age/gender are buying a lot recently).
I wondered if the Devs had any thoughts on that. Is it the sort of thing where - unlike facebook - you’ll be able to run the business of deposits from users and so won’t need to feed the advertising machine for cash. Or perhaps you reckon there’s a place for allowing services to tap into some recent transaction stings (so instead of lamp adverts I get lightbulbs?).
Other mainstream banks seem to be making noises about translating transactions into marketing revenue.
I’m not asking for a hard and fast commitment, nor for you to spool out the mondo playbook (I also understand that if you get bought out by Facebook, anything said now is at the whim of final owners)… but I’d be interested to know how you are approaching these questions and what you do and don’t feel is right for banks to be doing vis data sharing and marketing?
I read through the terms, and privacy policy, a week or so ago and was left feeling that they had been copied from elsewhere and edited a bit rather than being specially drafted for Mondo. So it might be these clauses are not really what Mondo intends. It would be good to know.
I’ll start a separate thread and provide some other more general feedback on these two documents.
both clauses appear bog standard to me. the first says they will send you info that you have requested or where you have given them permission to contact you. The other is to allow them to do marketing campaigns without liability issues, if they want to claim X% of their customers female or Y% live in Yorkshire say they can do so as long as they using aggregated data (i.e. not naming or identifying individuals) and don’t have to obtain the agreement of every customer in those particular groups
I agree, I don’t think there’s anything in there that is radical compared to what major banks seem to be doing currently. If anything my current high street bank is already worse, their promise is not to share data ‘outside the group’ which seems to contain quite a large number of different business arms with little said about how they might use that. Mondo do clearly say that, short of getting bought out, they won’t share anything to third parties without permission.
I also agree that aggregate data can be very productive and useful - both for socially conscious research and business goals, so this is not a searing complaint of the policy.
But given the debates that already rage over privacy across the tech sector, and how Mondo would seem to offer a series of very capable APIs, it would be interesting to hear if the Devs have thoughts on how they approach (big) user data that go beyond bog standard policy. Do they worry there could be a push in future for marketing analytics? What pushes and pulls have they seen around it? Is there already regulation etc.