Color me surprised. I just learned that online businesses utilize that personal data aggregation to battle fraud.
Situation: I went online to purchase a $500plus product. It kept being denied. After contacting the company, it turns out that my email address and phone number used did not match the “giant data base” of personal information. You know, the data collected by this new “personal data collection” economy that snuck up on us all.
They say that companies are using this method to prevent the huge amount of online fraud they are experiencing. According to them, bad-guys use a piece of our information to make a purchase (name, address, credit card?). Their systems match all required information (email address, phone number, etc.) to that giant collection of data they have on us. If anything does not match, they reject the purchase.
I didn’t know there was any legitimate use for this new data economy.
Is this a good thing?