[HN Gopher] US consumer spending dashboard built on data from 50... ___________________________________________________________________ US consumer spending dashboard built on data from 50M+ cards now on Snowflake Author : izyda Score : 100 points Date : 2023-11-01 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (app.snowflake.com) (TXT) w3m dump (app.snowflake.com) | dylan604 wrote: | with all of the fintech apps that attach to a card, i wonder if | they break down spending categories by vice. how many people | paying their dealer or other vice related friends with cashapp, | venmo, etc, and then bigData making the connection of what the | transactions really were? | izyda wrote: | Hey there - founder here. We can indeed break down by payments | in these FinTech apps. There are privacy concerns with certain | aspects of this, which we of course could not touch. However, | measuring the "shadow" economy, of course, serves a legitimate | purpose. | dylan604 wrote: | you're not doing yourself any favors with the privacy minded | folks that think people analyzing the data they did not | provide to you directly for that purpose is something to be | removed like cancer. but hey, at least you're honest about | the granularity of the unintended data you can discern from | the data you've purchased about everyday people. | izyda wrote: | I wasn't quite clear - we don't have access to identifying | information in the data (ie. we could measure Venmo but not | that John Doe paid $X to Jane Doe at phone number XXX-XXXX) | nerdponx wrote: | If you have individual transactions with unique | identifiers, that's basically the same thing. | terminous wrote: | > analyzing the data they did not provide to you directly | for that purpose is something to be removed like cancer | | For the record, cancer is an appropriate metaphor to | describe the data broker industry | dogman144 wrote: | Talking to adtech about their products vs criticizing their | products is the most illuminating thing a privacy-minded | person could do. | | The nonsense "we care about privacy" wrappers go away and | they start talking product-speak about the details. I don't | think privacy regulations change until adtech product leads | get comfortable enough talking publicly about their deadpan | views on what they can find out about users. | brundolf wrote: | There used to be a very funny website called Vicemo that would | scrape and display (public by default!) Venmo transactions | containing certain keywords/emojis | | https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/vicemo-collects-all-your-sket... | izyda wrote: | Yeah interestingly, Venmo makes (or at least used to make) | every public transaction available in their API | xnx wrote: | Hard to tell if this is interesting without seeing a sample of | the data. Though the data originates from "50M+" cards, the | summary doesn't make clear how many rows of data this is. Might | not be that many rows since it doesn't get any finer than weekly | granularity. | izyda wrote: | Hey founder here - | | It would be indeed great if Snowflake allowed us to preview the | data. That said, if you have a Snowflake account, you can mount | it and automatically get a trial (you can run arbitrary queries | against it). | | The data is aggregated at a weekly level, by category, | merchant, and demographics. It is not single individuals' data | if that is what you are after. | RC_ITR wrote: | Interesting product - compared to competitors like | SecondMeasure, what differentiates your panel/data cleaning | approach vs. everyone else (since I assume the data is | sourced from the same place as you competitors)? | izyda wrote: | I am a big admirer of what Second Measure built before | their acquisition. | | - Different data sources - More accurate (though this is of | course debateable, our plan is to publish benchmarks, | accuracy, transparency, etc.) but this will always be | debateable - Focus on data scientists & Snowflake users | (rather than a SaaS platform) | | Obviously, this is a very early product. The key is to join | types of datasets together, while maintaining accuracy (see | vision outlined here: | https://magis.substack.com/p/datanomics) | gigatexal wrote: | How are you getting this data? Are you paying brokers for it? | jeron wrote: | that's for him to know and you to find out | supportengineer wrote: | Who wrote the sample query? If I was trying to "Compare | Chipotle's sales performance to that of McDonald's", my query | would not start with "SELECT *". There would be some meaningful | columns. | izyda wrote: | Yeah that's fair. The tables are all in an EAV format (narrow), | so the number of columns coming along here is very small (you | would filter for Chipotle/McDonalds in your WHERE) but it is | fair that that sample query could be more instructive / better | practice to name columns. | ththth1 wrote: | what's your tech stack to process this data prior to loading to | snowflake? | izyda wrote: | We're doing almost everything entirely in Snowflake. Snowflake | is our lead investor (https://www.reuters.com/technology/data- | startup-cybersyn-rai...) and we've found it extremely helpful | to build entirely on their technology. | | We're ingesting from S3 or FTPs usually. | ZeroCool2u wrote: | It seems odd that you can't even preview a small cached subset | (10 rows?) of a table in Snowflake. I don't even remember a time | I couldn't see a table preview in BigQuery, so surely it's not a | technical limitation? | izyda wrote: | I definitely agree Snowflake Marketplace should have this.. | there is no technical limitation. | bagels wrote: | They could have baked it in to the descriptions or code | samples. | AirMax98 wrote: | White screen on iOS... render error? | izyda wrote: | Might be a render error on the Snowflake side -- check | https://docs.cybersyn.com/our-data-products/consumer/consume... | instead | elyrly wrote: | I'm curious how cybersyn sources the data (partnership with data | sellers? etc?) quality, reliability, and freshness are some that | come to mind. Entry point using snowflake marketplace (series a | investor) seems reasonable. We're missing the aha moments for | companies when they join cybersyn datasets to their own, that | story is hopefully in the works. | izyda wrote: | In general, we're sourcing from a variety of 1st party sources. | | But yes, the long term vision is to make this all joinable | (https://magis.substack.com/p/datanomics) | data_ders wrote: | what is a "card" in this context? credit card?! | izyda wrote: | Credit and debit cards | mritchie712 wrote: | The docs are more helpful then the link above: | | https://docs.cybersyn.com/our-data-products/consumer/consume... | riku_iki wrote: | Does this dashboard cost 2k/m?.. | ricardobayes wrote: | For those who can use this data to predict something/use it in | a model, I guess it's pocket money. This is some very powerful | data in the right hands. | | To add to that, 2k/mo is pretty much the "go-to" pricing for | most B2B SaaS products. | izyda wrote: | This is correct. Note you are not getting just the dashboard, | but you are getting the underlying data itself too -- so you | can write arbitrary queries. That said, it is meant for large | enterprises that have a clear path to ROI. | void-star wrote: | This begs the question: where is the button I can press to | see if my personal data is included and a quick and easy | way to inform you to remove it from your service? | ketzo wrote: | No personally identifying information in the dataset, so | I imagine you would have to find some way to deanonymize | yourself from clues in the data. | gardenhedge wrote: | How is it verified that the data is trustworthy then? | hipadev23 wrote: | $2k/mo for consumer credit card data is absurdly cheap by at | least an order of magnitude. So it's either mispriced or it's | garbage data. | izyda wrote: | It is aggregated data. You are correct that if someone were | selling data on individual cards, it would be a lot more | expensive. | hipadev23 wrote: | Aggregated or not, seeing Affinity's panel being sold for | peanuts on snowflake was not on my 2023 bingo card. | beefield wrote: | Sorry a small thread hijack. I may be considering returning to my | previous employer who has since I left started using Snowflake. | Is that unambiguously good or bad? If it can be either, are there | some questions I should check? (As a background, I am quite happy | writing my queries in SQL) | cj wrote: | "It depends" | | There's nothing inherently wrong with Snowflake. But like any | database it has a time and place. | nattaylor wrote: | In my experience it excels at the stated use case of OLAP in | the cloud with compute separate from storage and claim it's | unambiguously good for this. | | For OLTP it would be unambiguously bad (although maybe there's | hope with Unistore, which I haven't tried.) | | Many workloads are a mix and so it can become ambiguous whether | it's a great fit / great value / whatever you're defining | good/bad-ness by | mr_toad wrote: | As a data warehouse it's great. It's not a complete solution | for an analytics platform. Snowpark seems are bolted on and | doesn't really benefit from the core engine. It's reporting | capabilities are a bit weak. So you'll probably want some | external BI tools and/or tools like R and Python if you're | heavily into analytics. | tiahura wrote: | Any plans for cheaper plans with less or older data? | xyst wrote: | The "pay upfront" cost is $2,000/month. This is for data that was | obtained via a network of shady data brokers. Visa, MC, banking | industry can fuck off. | | Users likely not reimbursed for their data getting packaged and | resold by merchants, payment networks, or credit card issuers | hammock wrote: | This data was already available to purchase long before this, | for far more. Acxiom, Epsilon, etc | dogman144 wrote: | Getting downvoted for a true statement. | | Reading up on programmatic advertising from a perspective of | learning it vs resources that critique it is illuminating. | | You're describing how it works. Use cash and buy offline with | your cellphone left at home (yes, all 3), or get your data sold | for other people's products. | | I used to be more vocal about privacy but reviewing the innards | of the tech make me think this dynamic will never change. Too | much money and too well built. | TradingPlaces wrote: | Reeks of selection bias. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-01 23:00 UTC)