US Bank Watches Your Internet Browsing, Targets Sales Calls With the Data

by Gary Leff

If you’re a US Bank customer and you browse their website they may call you the next day to sell you what you were looking at.

According to Doctor of Credit they do this even if you aren’t logged into your account, they match your IP address to what they tracked when you were logged in to identify you.


Copyright: jetcityimage / 123RF Stock Photo

This program, in place for at least a year, alerts a banker the next day and tells then what you were searching for like a checking account or credit card.

We don’t seem to mind the federal government’s facial recognition scanning in airports, tracking all of our cell phone geolocation data, or vacuuming up internet traffic to query. And that’s far more intrusive than anything Facebook — or US Bank — does. People and politicians feign outrage over privacy but do little to protect their privacy online.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  2. We really need laws like in Europe so that IP’s are considered personal data and not allowed to be tracked. Reminder to self to start using Tor.

  3. They have been doing this for many years now. I’ve been a US Bank customer for about 18 years and have hadthem call me many times regarding car loan rates I had looked at or credit card products I looked at. I was never logged in at the time when looking at those pages. I always thought it was super creepy/big brotherish.

  4. US Bank is considered one of the world’s most ethical companies so they are ethically creepy if it makes you feel any better. Think of US Baqnk as the kindly burglar who keeps quiet so as not to disturb your sleep as he ransacks your house.

  5. One word: Privacybadger
    https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

    A project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation this Chrome/every-browser extension does a very nice job of blocking trackers (and most ads). I used Ghostery for years and it works fine, but I switched to Privacybadger a couple years ago because I support the EFF.

    Load it in memoriam John Perry Barlow and say Bye Bye to US Bank and its nasty trackers.

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