Barclays tells customers it will sell their spending habits as poll finds growing public concern about online privacy

Barclays Bank is to sell data on the spending habits of millions of its current and savings account customers to third parties.

The bank has written to customers to tell them it is going to package together ‘information about the transactions on your account’ to compile reports on spending trends across Britain.



The data could then be sold on other companies or government departments.



Big brother: Barclays Bank has told customers it intends to sell data on their collective spending and saving habits to third parties potentially including the government

It comes as civil liberties organisation Big Brother Watch released details today of a poll, which showed three quarters of people around the globe are concerned about their privacy online.

The poll of over 10,000 individuals across nine countries including the UK, German and France carried out by ComRe also found 41 per cent of people felt consumers were being harmed by big companies gathering large amounts of personal data for internal use.

Meanwhile, two thirds of people felt national regulators should do more to force Google to comply with existing laws concerning online privacy and the protection of personal data.

The decision by Barclays is part of a growing trend of companies generating revenue through monitoring customer behaviour patterns, and then selling that information on to others.

The planned changes, which come into effect in the autumn, will also see the bank starting to track customers through their mobile phones or other devices - to help protect them from fraud.

If a payment is made in a certain country, Barclays will ‘ping’ the customer's mobile number to check if the phone is in that country.

Watchful eye: Barclays has said it will also be monitoring customers mobile phones to track where they are if a transaction on their account is made from abroad

The decision by the bank was set out in new terms and conditions which have been sent to customers around the country and will take effect from the start of October, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Barclays said any customer data it sells would never be sold on in such a way that an individual customers was ‘identifiable’.

A spokeswoman said the data collected would be ‘high level’ numerical information, not personal.

The bank believes customers will benefit from the information it collects. Such benefits could include informing customers they are spending more than the rest of the neighbourhood on their energy bills, the bank suggested.

Barclays' new terms and conditions will cover all of their 15 million current and savings account holders. Customers will only be able to opt out of having their mobile phone tracked.



A spokesperson for the bank said: ‘We will only be using information in a very high level anonymised way



'When we say share with third parties what we are talking about is spending habit data of thousands of customers so for example we might share data with restaurants that consumers have started eating out more on Wednesdays than in the past.



'It's not about selling our customer's personal details to call centres of anything of that nature. That's absolutely not what this is about.'



Barclay's mobile phone tracking would also only be part of a number of fraud prevention checks, the spokesperson added.



Citing an example of if a customer appeared to be withdrawing £1,000 in Thailand the bank might choose to 'ping' the customer's mobile phone to see if they were connected to a local network in the country thereby establishing that they were genuinely there. Should that establish the customer was in fact still in the UK, Barclays would be able to identify the transaction as fraud and prevent it from taking place by refusing to release the funds from the customer's account.



Barclays added it had worked in partnership with the Information Commissioner to establish the terms and conditions and to ensure they were adhering to industry best practice.



In recent years the business of accumulating personal details about consumers to better target them for advertising has turned into a multi-billion pound industry.

A number companies now scour our web searches, social networking profiles, records of our recent purchases and public records to build up a very sophisticated picture of our habits, likes and dislikes.



It is now possible for companies to use personal information to find out whether someone is planning to buy a house, make a big purchase, or are about to have a baby.



This knowledge is invaluable to the right people and the industry has grown so quickly that such personal information is being sold for a fraction of a penny.

The cost of details of someone intending to buy a car, for example, is $0.002, according to a recent report by the Financial Times. The cost of knowing someone’s movie choices is $0.003, it added.

Last week, the biggest mobile phone operators in the country, Vodafone, EE and O2, said they would start selling bundles of anonymous data on their customers to big advertisers to help them target different age groups and demographics.

Tesco was the first company to spot the potential of ‘big data’ when it launched its Clubcard loyalty card 20 years ago. Data collected through the scheme was packaged together and sold to big food and drink companies so they could plan promotions or new campaigns.