Credit Card Blog

Should all credit card companies know all about you? If you haven’t got a credit card with for example, Barclays, is it right that they (Barclays) can access all the information there is out there on you?

I think this is a potential violation of privacy – but this is actually about to happen. Starting in December credit card companies are going to start sharing information. Apparently this is information that is readily available and held by credit reference agencies, but crucially, they don’t have to ask you for permission to look at your personal finances.

Currently, if you apply for a credit card or anything similar, you have to give permission for the provider to do a credit check on you. This effectively means they’ll check your credit score, and generally get a reasonable amount of information about your personal finances. Things like are you making regular payments, are you missing any payments, how many outstanding debts do you have etc, are all available to whomever you give permission to. The crucial thing here though is that you have to give companies permission to view all this.

Under the new framework, announced by the UK payments association (APACS), five credit card providers – including, HBOS, Barclaycard, GE Money, Capital One and MBNA, will share data available from credit reference agencies. This seems to mean that even if you haven’t given permission for any of them to look into your financial situation, they’ll know all about you if you have a credit card with one of the other providers.

Whether you apply for another credit card or not is entirely irrelevant. The very fact that you have a credit card with one of them will mean that all of them may be privy to your spending habits, how you repay your debts, and how much debt you may have.

I’m not sure about you – but this sounds like a typical case of Big Brother. My finances are my business – I’m particularly careful about who I allow access to. The very fact that now they may all know what I do is pretty scary!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 12:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
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