On a cool Sun­day evening last Octo­ber, I found myself sit­ting in an air­plane from Min­neapo­lis to Boston. The air­port book­store had shown a very lim­ited selec­tion of books that were nei­ther writ­ten by John Grisham nor writ­ten about n-step plans for per­sonal excel­lence. I had pur­chased Upton Sinclair’s The Jun­gle, and although the sub­ject inter­ests me, I was thor­oughly bored by it.

For­tu­nately, the woman sit­ting next to me was bored too, so she unsheathed her company-issued lap­top com­puter, fired up Microsoft Out­look, and pre­tended that she was read­ing week-old email mes­sages for the first time. (That is what impor­tant peo­ple do on air­planes.) I pre­tended that I was writ­ing in my journal.

“HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL! NOT TO BE DISCUSSED OUTSIDE THE COMPANY!” boldly pro­claimed the text at the top of her mes­sage. Sud­denly I was awake. I started tak­ing notes.

The woman worked for Fair Isaac, the com­pany that invented the credit score. She paused to open a draft of a let­ter to the customer—a large con­sumer elec­tron­ics chain based in Min­neapo­lis. It opened with a syco­phan­tic plea made even more embarass­ing by the promi­nent use of cap­i­tal­ized buzzwords:

“As a national leader in Cus­tomer Cen­tric­ity, Best Buy is…”

I laughed. Cus­tomer Centricity?

The let­ter briefly explained what Best Buy was buy­ing from Fair Isaac (for some­thing like $10 mil­lion): infor­ma­tion about their cus­tomers. But the inter­nal memo was far more explicit about how the research worked.

It seems that, some time ago, Mar­riott Inter­na­tional (the hotel chain) launched an expen­sive project with Fair Isaac to learn more about their cus­tomers by study­ing what else they buy. Mar­riott pro­vided Fair Isaac with all the credit card num­bers that its cus­tomers used to book rooms at their hotels. Fair Isaac then went to Cit­i­group, the largest provider of credit cards in the world, and for a sub­stan­tial sum of money pur­chased the com­plete trans­ac­tion his­to­ries of every Citi card holder—every credit card num­ber, every pur­chase made on the card, whom it was with, and how much it cost. Using their pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy to com­bine the datasets, Fair Isaac built a data­base with the name, address, and per­sonal spend­ing his­tory of every Mar­riott hotel cus­tomer with a Citi credit card. They used this data to teach Mar­riott more about the per­sonal lives of their customers.

The Best Buy project would be very sim­i­lar to the Mar­riott project. Best Buy would pro­vide Fair Isaac with all their cus­tomer data—all their credit card num­bers and a list of all the prod­ucts that were pur­chased with those cards. Fair Isaac would re-use the Cit­i­group data for cor­re­la­tion, and whammo! Best Buy gets a list of every­thing their credit card cus­tomers have bought out­side of Best Buy stores. But there’s a catch. It is imper­a­tive, the memo stated, that Best Buy is not to find out that their project would employ data pur­chased from Citigroup—that pur­chase is a closely-held secret. Fur­ther­more, said the memo, nei­ther Mar­riott nor Cit­i­group is not allowed to find out that their data is being re-used with another customer.

Why the secrecy? Per­haps it’s not com­mon knowl­edge that credit card com­pa­nies will sell all of your per­sonal data—even your social secu­rity number—to any­one who asks for it.

If you think Big Brother isn’t watch­ing every move you make, not­ing every place you go, and scru­ti­niz­ing every thing you buy, you’re prob­a­bly right. But pri­vate com­pa­nies are—at least if you’re using a credit card.