A description of what you are supposed to be able to opt-out from on Visa cards is here:
"In some countries, Visa enhances card transaction data and uses it to generate anonymised and aggregated consumer spending and marketing reports and other data products that enable companies to improve their marketing efforts. These solutions help companies identify consumers that they can target."
This is incorrect, you're describing a mitigation approach which may be what is happening where you live, but many other countries are aiming for full suppression and having some success.
Hi Nostrademos — I was involved in this project. We asked a lot of questions and the answers to some others were quite a bit more controversial (we're going to release a new question each week or thereabouts).
But one thing we learned in the process was that seriously successful people doing their thing feel pretty gagged.
It's not worth it for them to write even things that seem uncontroversial to you or me, because someone out there might hate it, or misinterpret it, and start creating problems for them.
> "I find this website absurd. Is it really just articles by random people which give high-level advice on how to have a career? ... This is garbage and just not redeemable."
Thanks for your feedback. If you look around you'll see it's almost all written by a handful of full-time staff - this piece from an anonymous contributor is almost unique.
Most articles we write at this point are less high-level than this one, though pages that focus on general advice which is applicable to a wide range of people naturally attract the most traffic.
As I've said to others it highlights one weakness with the model - that it will always say a longer possible search is better because it raises your odds to success and the model features no cost for searching. When you add a cost to delay the appropriate time to spend exploring drops massively.
As I say in the article, the question is how inaccurate these things are - are they good enough to be useful? Or so inaccurate that on balance they're misleading?
This is a good article. I just wanted to take issue with this claim: "Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can."
"In some countries, Visa enhances card transaction data and uses it to generate anonymised and aggregated consumer spending and marketing reports and other data products that enable companies to improve their marketing efforts. These solutions help companies identify consumers that they can target."
https://www.visa.co.uk/legal/privacy-policy-opt-out.html