Check the Privacy Terms of your Credit Cards

Preview:

Credit card companies are collecting information about everything you buy. They then sell that information to marketers. Here's how to turn mitigate this with a few credit cards.

I noticed my Capital One Credit Card was sending my personal information to whoever would buy it. I was shocked at how hard they made it to stop this. Here is my experience trying to stop my three credit cards from selling my personal information to others so they could spam me. I suggest you try this for your credit cards as well.

Capital One

I downloaded my credit card statement from Capital One and was surprised at this table appearing at the bottom of the fourth page.

Capital One Privacy Settings

I was surprised about the bottom two items. They'll share any of my personal information (including what??) with anyone so they can market to me. There is no way online to stop it. When I called their phone number, I was sent into what appeared to be a perpetual phone maze of places I didn't want to be. I had to hit 0 about 50 times before they decided to give me a person. This is my general trick for phone mazes. Just hit zero over and over, regardless of what they ask. Eventually, they'll send you to a live person.

Once I got to a person, they quickly turned off sharing with partners and advertising, but would continue providing information to credit bureaus, and anyone else they want to market with.

Chase Amazon and US Bank

Chase Amazon card has a main menu item called, "Security and Privacy" Below is a section called "Privacy & marketing communications"

Under Privacy preferences, you can limit sharing regarding credit worthiness, sharing for marketing purposes with affiliates and marketing sharing with nonaffiliates. I only allowed the creditworthiness.
Marketing Email Preferences. I unsubscribed to all of them.

US Bank

Nothing makes sense. There is a menu, but it is all about who can directly access your account information, not who they share with for marketing. They have an automated phone number (800-872-2657), rather than a person. I am not sure how it works. They have 4 choices. The fourth is to share as much as possible with whoever. The other three seem different. I don't know how it works. I chose the third option, which seemed the most restrictive, but didn't understand them. For example, do we need to go through the menu 3 times and select each restriction, or are they cumulative? I hoped they were cumulative, but don't know.

If anyone is sure how this works, please let me know and I'll update this article.

Date: June 2024

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