cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/125466
My credit card issuer apparently never gets to know what I purchased at stores, cafes, & restaurants – and rightfully so. The statement just shows the shop name, location, and amount.
Exceptionally, if I purchase airfare the bank statement reveals disclosures:
- airline who sold the ticket
- carrier
- passenger name
- ticket number
- city pairs
So that’s a disturbing over-share. In some cases the airline is a European flag carrier, so IIUC the GDPR applies, correct? Doesn’t this violate the data minimization principle?
Airlines no longer accept cash, which is also quite disturbing (and illegal in jurisdictions where legal tender must be accepted when presented for PoS transactions).
Has anyone switched to using a travel agent just to be able to pay cash for airfare?
UPDATE
A relatively convincing theory has been suggested in this other cross-posted community:
https://links.hackliberty.org/comment/414338
Apparently it’s because credit cards offer travel insurance & airlines have incentive to have another insurer involved. Would be useful if this were documented somewhere in a less refutable form.
GDPR question still outstanding.
Airlines never pay, that’s what they have insurance for 😉
The way it works, commercial air travel is highly regulated, with lots of laws regarding both safety and consumer rights. Airlines don’t risk having to pay for breaching any of it, instead they find an insurance company that will asses the company, estimate the chance of certain breaches happening, run their numbers… and gamble on asking the airline to pay a fee that they expect to be higher than what they expect to pay out the airline for its failures.
When you put a claim against an airline, they’ll send you away just so their insurer doesn’t raise their insurance payments. If you sue them, and win… the airline still won’t pay, it will most likely be the airline’s insurer (unless the airline loses their claim for the insurer to cover the costs of paying you, but that would be rare and kind of neglectful on the airline’s part).
When you pitch your own insurance company against an airline, it’s really going to talk to the airline’s insurance company, if they aren’t the same company to begin with… and as luck would have it, both insurers don’t make their profits on whether they pay your claim or not (unless it’s something really egregious), but on raising the regular payments for the airline and your bank, so they’re very likely to just grant your claim and raise their fees.
That’s… a resounding “maybe”.
Prepaid cards come in more kinds than banks issuing them; some are linked to a main account, some are separate entities, some have a per-card account… with a physical version, virtual, virtual physical, “print your own from a PDF” (not joking)… VISA, MasterCard… with all kind of paybacks, premiums, and whatnot… all depending on the given card’s contract, payment processor’s contract, general account conditions, general bank conditions. Some come with insurance from the bank, some from the payment processor, some don’t… but even then, the bank may or may not request or get your travel details, maybe as a “standard procedure”.
And some do offer online statements… and sometimes the statements appear as a pre-statememt, then get completed with more and more data some days later.