Now Credit Card Companies Want Your DNA

A Wall Street Journal article earlier this week reported that Visa and MasterCard are exploring new ways to take data about your buying habits in the brick-and-mortar world and let online marketers use that information to target you with ads when you browse the web. But buried a little ways down in the article are some details that are considerably more alarming. Visa, the article says, wants access to everything from your insurance claim history to your Facebook friends list to your DNA. Yes, you read that right:

According to a Visa patent application published in April, the company sees potential to use a wide array of personal details to create profiles that could be used for ad targeting well beyond shopping details. It describes the possibility of also using “information from social network websites, information from credit bureaus, information from search engines, information about insurance claims, information from DNA databanks,” and other sources.

This is a huge can of worms, warns Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “This is going to be problematic,” she says...