--snip--
Airtel ad other telcos have been doing this for years in India - without any formal consent from the consumer.
Airtel sells the bill payment patterns to NBFCs to build their financial risk models for consumers based in rural/sub-urban localities ( due to the lack of other consumer data). Based on their telephone/mobile bill payment patterns , the NBFCs can gauge the riskiness of a customer with respect to loan disbursements .
This is interesting. I got this
old link where Airtel planned to get into insurance and mutual funds. Where did you get the source about selling data to NBFC's for credit scoring. It's quite possible.
It's funny how the poorest have to struggle for loan of a few thousand rupees while the rich get huge loans on the basis of simply their connections. The recent exposes, especially the one with Chanda Kochar are damning and shameful.
Having said that, this is disturbing . A few steps towards avoiding this from the users side would be
1. To always shuffle the bitcoin address for all transactions
2. Use a VPN/ be behind a proxy server.
3. Avoid transactions that are linked to a physical address . ( avoiding delivery of goods to a location )
4. Needless to say , avoid transactions which are linked to personally identifiable information (PII) , like PAN, bank account etc
5. In case of buying coupons/goods Try using transactions which give you the option of going to the store in person and physically collecting the goods.
Nice points there. What exactly do you mean by the Point no. 3 there?? If you order something through, say, purse.io, you do need an address. Or are you suggesting this in terms of p2p trades??