Your payment history is a diary you never agreed to write. The question is who gets to read it.
Every financial transaction leaves a trace. Not just a record of the purchase — the amount, the merchant, the time — but a point in a pattern. Enough points, and a pattern becomes a portrait.
Payment companies, banks, data brokers, and advertisers have been assembling those portraits for decades. Your transaction history can reveal where you live, where you work, how you commute, who you spend time with, whether you're religious, whether you're pregnant, whether you're in financial distress.