Barclays to sell customer data

Barclays is to start selling information about 13 million customer’ spending habits to other companies, and has admitted it could share the data with government departments and MPs.

In letters being sent to customers, it is also outlining what details about them it holds and uses which, it said, "may include images of you or recordings of your voice", as well as comments made in interactions with the bank on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. 

However, the bank assured customers that any data it passed on to third-party companies would be aggregated to show trends, and that individuals would not be identifiable from it.

Given the reports of the spying activities of GCHQ and the NSA about what data they can access and what intelligence they share with each other, the outcry and debate that has followed has left everybody weary about their information being shared or their privacy invaded. 

But fear not because good old Barclays bank has stepped in and announced that it will be giving its customers details away, all in the name of a profit of course.

You’d think that given the row over GCHQ and the NSA Barclays might have shelved this plan or pushed it back, but  being a bank and seeing a profit of course they were never going to do that, what was I thinking.

I wonder if anyone at Barclays actually double checked this because they blatantly contradict themselves by saying that some of the data that will be sold may include images of you and your voice recordings, yet go on to say individuals won’t be able to be identified from it, that’s bulls**t.

This news comes on the same day that a glitch in Facebook’s data archive meant that the email addresses and telephone numbers of six million people where shared with people who shouldn’t have had access to that kind of information.

When will these companies realise that customers give you their details in good faith and don’t want you to sell to their information on to third parties, because all it does is p**s them off and puts off any potential new customers, so it’s actually quite self-defeating and they should all stop it.