tl;dr Whenever you link a card, Lolli uses the least data required to qualify your transactions and calculate your bitcoin rewards. We have never and will never collect or sell your personal information.
About Card Linking
With card-linked offers, merchants generously reward shoppers for their loyalty when they make purchases using their existing debit and credit cards. Card-linked offer programs have existed for many years, rewarding in the form of cashback or points. But until now, this has never been done with bitcoin rewards.
People may not know that many of these card-linking programs have the ability to see your spending habits and other private information. On the surface, you open the app, enter your info, and boom, you start earning rewards. But depending on the method used, generally, these apps can see:
- Your transaction history
- Potentially unrelated accounts that have nothing to do with rewards, such as savings accounts, loans, investments, retirement accounts, etc.
- Data determining creditworthiness, such as balances, limits, APRs, payment due dates (even being able to determine if your account is past due), etc.
- Sometimes even location data
If you are all about rewards and don't mind the above caveats, great, more power to you.
However, if you are privacy-minded, like Lolli, you don't necessarily want to trade this private data for rewards, even if (or especially when) those rewards are in bitcoin.
Lolli Does It Better
True to form, Lolli has not only built the most efficient way to earn bitcoin with your existing cards, but we have also built the most private way. Lolli is not a data broker, meaning we do not collect and sell personal information. It's just not our business model. We get paid by merchants when you shop at their site or stores, so our only goal is to turn your qualified purchases into cold hard bitcoin. With that mind, we set out to build our own card-linking rewards service with a focus on three things:
- Security
- Privacy
- The highest reward rates in the industry!
To do this, we use OAuth connections for the most popular banks. "What is OAuth?" you ask? Simply put, it is a way for you to securely sign into your bank without sending your username and password across Lolli servers. When you link your card, we'll put you right on the bank's web site where you can enter your credentials, and on the backend, the bank gives us limited permissions to relevant parts of your transaction history.
At this point, we can start qualifying your transactions for bitcoin rewards. "Wait, Matt, what about all that private data you mentioned?" Excellent question, internet person. Instead of taking the shotgun approach of other apps, we collect and process only the relevant account types, transaction categories, applicable merchants, and data necessary to qualify and calculate your rewards. We have no use for identifying your loans or creditworthiness. Location data doesn't even come into play except for local offers. We don't want to be responsible for anything extraneous to our mission, so that stuff is sequestered, anonymized, and purged.
Who Can See This Stuff?
We maintain rigorous access controls to sensitive systems, compliant with SOC2 and PCI DSS standards, in order to prevent internal employees (and external attackers) from snooping. Lolli Employees with high levels of access are accountable to each other for data stewardship and protection. Aggregated, anonymized statistics are viewable by business development teams but contain no personally identifiable information, meaning they can see, for example, x number of orders at y value but not who made each purchase or received each reward. Ultimately and obviously, purged data cannot be seen by anyone. Less data is the best data!
Your New Bitcoin Rewards Card
With Lolli’s new card linked rewards feature, you can turn any card into a bitcoin rewards card. You get to keep your perks, existing rewards, status, etc. and now get bitcoin back on top of your existing card. This means you already have in your very hands the best bitcoin rewards card on the market, and now you know a little bit more about how Lolli works hard to make it the most private and most secure.
If you haven't already, download the Lolli app, link your card, and start earning bitcoin today. We'll do the heavy lifting, and you can shop safely knowing that Lolli always has your back.