#Square SELLS #ACCESS to your #INBOX. #No_one seems to #know if the #law cares.
When my work inbox got flooded with reminders of my most twee shopping habits, I found out the Block-owned service throws up obstacles to getting out of its marketing business.
When COVID-19 forced Compass Coffee to close down its Washington, D.C.–area shops, the roastery’s owners turned to email to stay in touch with customers. They knew just the tool: The company was already all in on Square. Compass co-founder Michael Haft had even taken a glass-blowing class from Jim McKelvey, who co-founded the service.
“It’s always just been a great point-of-sale system — very intuitive for our baristas, very easy for customers,” Haft said. To his delight, Haft discovered that Square also gave Compass the potential to reach out to both a small number of its most loyal customers as well as many, many would-be local coffee sippers. Now, he pays $200 per month for access to a list of at least 15,000 email addresses of his more casual customers in Square’s directory, he said, which is “absolutely” a huge multiple of the ones Compass collected itself.
I was speaking with Haft because I’ve been receiving Compass marketing messages at my work email address — as I have been from fruit stands, an artisanal butcher, and a cheesemonger, plus a Korean bowl spot I run to for dinner too often and the boutique where I bought a set of cloth napkins the color of autumn leaves last year. It’s a record of my bougiest shopping habits, and as marketing goes, most of the messages are more appealing than what I get from major mainstream retailers that don’t use Square.
Here’s the thing though: I can’t remember ever having checked out at any of these merchants using my work email address, much less using it to sign up for marketing. A search of my account didn’t turn up any records. Annoyed with the most insistent emailers, I reached out to the sellers who reached out to me — except, as a reporter rather than as a customer — to figure out what was going on.
I wanted to know how all these merchants had gotten my professional contact info. What I discovered was both unsurprising in today’s world of relentless online marketing and aggressive consumer data sharing, and also a bit disquieting. It also had less to do with these small shops than I might have expected: Square’s parent company, Block, was selling access to customers’ inboxes, even if all we do is elect to receive a receipt from a single transaction (more on that below).
Privacy experts said selling marketing information in this way clearly falls short of best privacy practices. And while it doesn’t appear to violate data protection laws, the practice is walking a fine line.
“They’re trying to solve for a lot of different nuances whilst trying to serve their objective and their merchant objective, which is keeping as many people opted in as possible,” said Sucharita Kodali, a vice president and retail analyst at Forrester.
Experts also told Protocol the situation seems to highlight how Block, as well as other payment processors and fintech platforms, operate in a bit of a privacy gray zone. Sometimes that gray zone leaves no one in charge of consumers’ data rights, and sometimes it means the companies, deep within their terms of service, have legal loopholes that give them room to use our information in ways we might not expect.
‘Surprising is never good’
My work inbox’s collision with Square-powered marketing seemingly began in June, when I had a receipt for a small processing fee related to obtaining a press pass sent to it. I paid with a personal card, and that transaction added my work address to my existing Square profile, which was in turn already linked with that card. That was all it took. Even though I’ve never used that particular card at most of the businesses now emailing me, and I don’t get any other receipts sent to my work email, the address was circulated to marketing lists far and wide.
https://www.protocol.com/policy/block-square-privacy
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