Hi all,
Thanks for your patience! Sorry it took a while to post a full update.
Based on the comments in the thread, we’ve taken the time to do a full review of our set up. We really care about this, so wanted to take the time to get it right.
I wanted to explain where we’re at today. As we outline in our privacy notice, we use “Your mobile advertising ID, so we can share it with companies that help us with advertising online. You can reset this ID or limit tracking in ‘Settings’ on your phone.” This is a pseudo-anonymous identifier, generated by your phone, designed to show more relevant ads to you in a privacy safe manner. We use this mainly to exclude existing customers from seeing Monzo adverts (for obvious reasons), as well as making sure we’re showing the right ads to the right people. We made the decision to use it because we think it’s one of the most privacy-friendly options — and we don’t pair it with any identifying information when sending. Based on the feedback here though, it’s clear we can do more to help you control this, so we’re going to build a switch to let you control this in the Monzo app.
Some of you also spotted that the Facebook tool showed a large number of events coming from the Monzo app, whereby there was an event for every app open. This was a bug that only occurred on iOS devices — we’d fixed it on Android last year (see higher up this thread here), but unfortunately the iOS fix was not released. We’re sorry it’s taken so long, we know this isn’t good enough and we’re putting in place a process to stop this happening in future. It’s now fixed in today’s iOS app release.
We’ve decided to go one step further though and, as of today’s app releases on both iOS and Android, the Facebook SDK is no longer in the Monzo app. This means we can fully control what data is sent to Facebook from our backend, and we will no longer be making requests to Facebook directly from your device, so your IP Address will no longer be shared with them.
It’s also clear that we can do more to ensure our customers are aware of what’s happening behind the scenes. We’ve always worked to be as open and transparent as possible and this is no different. We’ll be adding clear, useful wording as part of the sign-up flow in the Monzo app to explain what we share and why, and reviewing the same on our website.
And finally, to reiterate: we do not share personal data with third parties for their own direct marketing purposes without permission from the customer. We do not sell customer data to third parties for marketing purposes. We never share balance, transactions or any sensitive information for marketing purposes. The above is just to help us run ads for Monzo more effectively and you can opt out any time in your device settings.
I hope that helps and answers the questions you (rightly) have!