[xmodem]

Kind of cool, but I bank with the bank in question (Ubank / National Australia Bank) and I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable that they'd use my transaction history like this.

[jbewes]

Hi xodem, I'm Jennie, the Digital Director at UBank. I just wanted to reassure you that privacy was taken extremely seriously -- no personal customer information is available even within the database, and we've ensured strict compliance with privacy laws.

We also took an extra step around setting a minimum uniqueness level of 'Less than 10' - so there won't ever be a scenario shown for 1/2/5 PeopleLikeU as queried in the comments below.

Hope you enjoy the experience - we really wanted to give the value of the data safely back to the people who created it to help you make more informed decisions on what, where and how much you spend.

Feel free to tweet me @jbewes or the team @Ubank, or even Facebook msg them facebook.com/ubank if you've any more queries.

Cheers, Jen :)

[Volpe]

If your identity isn't attached... it isn't your history. It's just 'a' history.

[BigTigger]

I work for an Australian Bank. We had an internal competition where they didn't sanitise the data for this competition well enough. After a week of analysing the data one of the people in competing in the competition knew who's data we were looking at. It was a friend of theirs.

All identifying information had been removed/sanitised, they could tell from looking at the spending habits.

I disagree with your statement.

[Volpe]

... So they knew, because they already knew. So really they just confirmed.

Ask that person to go and find my details, and they will surely fail. Because they know nothing about me, and the transaction history doesn't tell them anything... thus it is not 'identifying'.

[gggggggg]

what if there are only 5 'people like me'. Or even 1 or 2.

[Volpe]

That still isn't your identity. You can identify yourself by it, but no one else can. Unless they already know that information about you... it which case, they already knew...