Tuck Shop Attack

Hi Scott,

You have talked about in-school marketing programs (like ‘Dollarmites’) and how they hook kids into using the big banks. Well, I have a concern that we are doing the same now with the ‘Qkr!’ program that is run in schools so kids can pay for stuff at the tuckshop. To sign up, parents have to provide their bank details, and their kids’ details as well. The fact is that Qkr! is owned and run by Mastercard. Isn’t this just another way of gaining access to information about our kids’ buying habits?

Troy

Hi Troy,

Yes, of course it is.I had a look through Qkr’s terms and conditions:

Mastercard collects your kid’s photograph, and tracks your location, preferences, interests and behaviours, so they can ”send you marketing materials and personalised content”.

On my evil-banker-meter, that’s fairly standard practice.

(It’s not like they’re Commbank, who pay schools kickbacks to sign kids up to their credit card marketing funnel.)

And it’s no worse than what’s going on in your kid’s bedrooms, where every click and swipe they make is tracked.

Big tech is collecting kids’ data at an alarming rate — as much as 72 million data points before they turn 13 — according to ad platform SuperAwesome.

And even vigilant parents can be caught out: this week Google’s YouTube got caught collecting children’s personal data without their parents’ consent, and was fined million (mere pocket change!).

Thankfully, former Google boss Eric Schmidt has kindly offered us parents a simple solution to all this digital creepiness: we should simply let young people change their names when they turn 18 so they can escape their digital past.

See, billionaire tech leaders have all the answers!

Scott