11/20/13 11:06 - ID#58328

Google wants a cut

Not that I really expect privacy using Google/NSA services for free, but I got this email the other day after reimbursing (e:Paul) for his services (really it was for a restaurant I think?).

Hello Joe,

It appears that you may be sending transactions that violate our Terms of Service for Send Money with Gmail.

Your Google Wallet account has recently come under review for a Terms of Service violation. Your transaction on 25 Oct 2013 for $25.00 to paulsidekick@gmail.com with the memo, “hookers and blow”, is in violation of Sections 6 and 7 of the Google Wallet Terms of Service for Send Money with Gmail. We may decline to process such transactions or close your account if we identify in the future that you are using your account for these purposes.

You can review the Terms of Service at: .

Please note that replies to this message are not monitored. If you experience any further issues with your Google Wallet Account, you may visit support.google.com/wallet .

Sincerely,
The Google Wallet Team

I think that is super creepy and a violation of privacy for them to be reading information put in Google Wallet memos, but I did agree to it in the Terms of Services agreement that I did not read.

Transaction Information: For each transaction, the transaction information about Google Wallet from us can be collected. This includes the date, time and the transaction amount, a description provided by the seller of the goods or services offered, photos that you have attached to the transaction, the name and e-mail addresses of the seller and buyer and the client and the recipient, the payment method used for your description of the reason for the transaction and, if the offer associated with the transaction.

Note to anyone using Google for anything financial related: you can opt out of sharing your transactions with marketers here.

joe writes at 02:50:58 11/23/13 - Comment #70799: Unfortunately the NFC features require access to the secure element on the SIM, which they use to encrypt the payment information from what I can tell [link=http://www.smartcardalliance.org/pages/publications-nfc-frequently-asked-questions#7]Link[/link]. Since it's on the SIM the carrier controls access to it. I'm not sure what carriers allow access to it, but for at least AT&T they block Google Wallet's access and only allow their competing ISIS app to use it (which doesn't have half the features or card support that Google does.

tinypliny writes at 01:04:08 11/21/13 - Comment #70793: I am guessing here, but I think if you have an open Google phone + a Google voice account operating over wifi, you can use those NFC features. I have seen them being used.

tinypliny writes at 01:02:15 11/21/13 - Comment #70792: When you have infinite datasets, each of them petabytes or higher in size, classification and prediction algorithms become incredibly precise. There are no crippling distributional or parametric assumptions you need to make for your models because the real distribution of the data is available to you without any restrictions (I am drooling at this thought and (e:Paul) can understand why. ;))

If I were take a guess, it's not just the words, it's the nature of the words. I would speculate about the usage of the words "hookers" and "blow", the contexts in which they most occur, the demographic that is most likely to use these particular words, the geographical region they arose from (proximity to state/international borders etc).. the list of information extraction inferences are fascinating and endless. Put those all together, and its a flag serious enough to trigger that email.

Statistics is the most fascinating subject on the planet. :)

joe writes at 12:25:33 11/21/13 - Comment #70791: Google Wallet hooks up to your bank account through ACH I think. I almost never have cash, and since there's no transaction fee for bank transfers I can transfer money right out of my account to someone else's Wallet. They can either keep it in their wallet or transfer it into their bank account!

There's a bunch of other crazy awesome features it's supposed to do like NFC tap-to-pay with whatever credit cards you enter in your phone, but I don't think there is a carrier that allows it in the US.

libertad writes at 12:19:03 11/21/13 - Comment #70789: I'm just curious as to why you would use google wallet to pay someone back? So when you pay someone what do they do with the virtual money? It is funny that they flagged you for this!

joe writes at 12:12:16 11/21/13 - Comment #70787: I'm sure it is and I understand why it's monitored, and that it's likely never even come close to being looked at by a human . I just think it's crazy that they even monitor the memos automatically. Would someone actually using google wallet for drugs/prostitution really put it in the memo? It seems like the signal to noise ratio for something like that would be ridiculous!

Maybe not though, I mean who else is better at data mining than google?

tinypliny writes at 02:14:14 11/21/13 - Comment #70786: Money laundering and sex/drug trafficking is more prevalent than you think. For a free service, it's a massive nightmare to protect its interests in the face of >1 Billion users in the system. That is ~ 1/8th of the population on the planet. Most of this usage is very minimally monitored and that too by predictive/statistical machine-learning anonymized algorithms.

Think of how the govt. or the "Rockstar" consortium can use that to shut Google down and you will start to understand why this is so necessary.

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