It is no secret that we have little privacy anymore. But once in a while, companies still have the ability to shock us with how much they know.
When you sign up for Bilt, a loyalty and payment platform best known for giving people the ability to earn rewards points while paying rent, it asks you to link your credit cards. Once Bilt has those, it can send you points when you do business with its partners.
So far, so good. But here’s something curious: Bilt can present you with a list of the cards you have, even though you’re a new customer. It’s not hiding that fact either, since it puts this information — the card names and the last few digits of the card number — right under your nose.
How on earth did Bilt get this information?
A handful of freaked-out people on Reddit have tried to figure it out in the past year or so. And when Bilt became the monthly maintenance payment platform for residents in my building, one neighbor turned off the feature that can instantly link your cards and told the rest of us how to do it.
To understand why Bilt shows you this information, you have to take a step back and examine what Bilt is actually trying to accomplish.
In the bad old days, you couldn’t pay your rent with a credit card and earn miles or other points for those thousands of dollars. Sometimes, big landlords would accept plastic, but they’d charge you a service fee, or the merchant fees that building owners paid ended up embedded in the (higher) rent.
Bilt helped to change that, by cutting a deal with Wells Fargo to issue co-branded credit cards that people could use to pay rent. The partnership helped cover the costs of the reward points that Bilt issues itself.
That partnership did not work out — neither Bilt nor Wells Fargo would say why — and Bilt has created a new partnership with a card-issuing company called Cardless.
Meanwhile, some landlords and building management companies started partnering with Bilt and paying the company to handle leasing and billing for residents. Bilt essentially became their digital checkout system in addition to their rewards provider. If renters renew their leases — often with the help of Bilt bonus points — Bilt makes money, too.
The company also built a network of merchants (more than 40,000 so far), with an emphasis on businesses close to the buildings it has partnered with. The company makes money from merchants through this effort as well.
In essence, the company wants you to think of it as a universal loyalty program built around your neighborhood. And if you link your cards and patronize the network merchants, Bilt can hand over information to, say, a partner coffee shop.
If that shop uses what Bilt describes as members’ “anonymized preferences” at “an aggregate building level” to learn about their spending habits, it could choose to reward them even more to try to keep them away from the new Starbucks nearby (for as long as Starbucks is not a Bilt partner, at least).
So that’s a big part of why Bilt wants you to link your cards and puts that list in front of you after you sign up.
And how does Bilt get the information about your cards shown in front of you? It works with a company called Method Financial, which gets it from various places, including the credit bureaus, the card networks (like Visa and Mastercard) and the card issuers themselves.
This is all legal — a permissible purpose, in the parlance of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, though there are other federal and state rules that address this sort of thing.
And you agree to let Bilt present the cards in your wallet to you (and for Method Financial to help) when you register for a Bilt account. It’s in the terms and conditions, which, as ever, few people read.
“We are not some magical, mysterious institution that has all your data,” said Mit Shah, Method Financial’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “We act primarily as your agent upon your consent.”
Bilt is aware that some people find this spooky, but the offer to link your cards has not gotten in the way of its growth so far.
“It’s just about removing friction,” said Ankur Jain, Bilt’s founder and CEO. “We’re not buying any data.”
Still, you don’t have to link your credit cards to use Bilt to pay your rent or monthly maintenance. Paying directly from your bank account is an option.
So avoid all of that if it creeps you out, and sacrifice some points that you could turn into frequent-flyer miles or other goodies. Otherwise, do as many users do and link your cards, heading down what now seems like an inexorable path toward nearly everyone knowing almost everything about everyone else.