Barclays burnishes banking bête noire image with data sell-off plan
Barclays is seeking to burnish its reputation as a banking bete noire by announcing that it will sell on customer data from millions of current and savings account holders from the autumn.
The bank has informed customers that ‘information about the transactions on your account’ will be sold on to third parties such as other companies and government departments and used to inform reports on consumer spending patterns.
In addition the bank will also track customers via their mobile phones to ensure that overseas payments are legitimate – by checking that the phone is in the country in which the transaction was made.
These changes to customer’s terms and conditions are due to take effect in October.
Barclays insists that all data will be anonymised to ensure individual customers are not ‘identifiable’ and would consist of ‘high-level’ account information, not personal details.
The bank further insists that customers would benefit from the move through such instances as being informed if their household energy bills were significantly higher than the neighbourhood average.
Barclays said in a statement: “We only use information in a numerical, anonymised and aggregated way, as is standard practice at many companies.
“Mobile location data will be used for fraud prevention purposes only and therefore only on the occasions where [there] is a transaction on a customer’s account that has been picked up by our fraud detection systems.”
A raft of big name firms have announced plans to sell on data in recent months; notably Vodafone, EE and O2.