4-12. Debate whether it is ethical for marketers to use metadata to link individual consumers with specific credit card transactions. (AACSB: Communication; Ethical Reasoning).

Everyone generates metadata as they use technologies such as computers and mobile devices to search, post, Tweet, play, text, and talk. What many people don’t realize, however, is that this treasure trove of date, time, and location information can be used to identify them without their knowledge. For example, in analyzing more than a million anonymous credit card transactions, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were able to link 90 percent of the transactions to specific users with just four additional bits of metadata, such as user locations based on apps such as Foursquare, the timing of an activity such as a Tweet on Twitter, or playing a mobile game.
Since there are more mobile devices than there are people in the United States and 60 percent of purchases are made with a credit card, marketing research firms are gobbling up all sorts of metadata that will let them tie a majority of purchase transactions to specific individuals.