Leaked Document Shows How Big Companies Buy Credit Card Data on Millions of Americans

Yodlee, the largest financial data broker in the U.S., sells data pulled from the bank and credit card transactions of tens of millions of Americans to investment and research firms, detailing where and when people shopped and how much they spent. The company claims that the data is anonymous, but a confidential Yodlee document obtained by Motherboard indicates individual users could be unmasked.

"Let me be blunt. This is bullshit 'anonymization,'" Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an email after reviewing a section of the document.