Trading 212 selling user data

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#1

Quick question, a quick Google search didn’t give me the answer I need.

Couple years back we all heard about robinhood selling it’s user data to 3rd parties.

I was wondering.

Is trading212 doing the same? (If not through a second party like Truelayer, which is the third party they use who handles our payments)

Edit: for clarification, I’m not suggesting personal information. I’m asking about our in app behaviour, the trades we make, the stocks we save in our wishlist, the ETF’s we look at, all that nitty gritty.

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#2

If you Google T212 privacy policy, have a read. That contains all the info you need.

#3

No it does not.

It doesnt directly state anything about the subject or am I missing something?

#4

I haven’t read it myself. Is there not a section about who they share your data with?

#5

They have a section about personal data. Which of course is protected according to EU regulations.

I’m talking user info, all the trades you make, the stocks you look at. All that good stuff big company’s would pay top dollar for.

#6

From the privacy policy:

We will not share or sell your information with third parties for their own independent marketing or business purposes without your consent.

#7

So is agreeing to the privacy policy terms, giving consent?

This is really vague…

Can someone from the company clear this up?

#8

It very much depends on what services you use. If you use third parties such as trulayer they have their own policies.

Also from the same policy:

If you have any questions with regard to your rights or the present policy or if you consider that we have failed to respect your confidentiality, you may contact us by:

Phone: +44 203 769 98 97
Email: info@trading212.com
Address: Trading 212 UK Ltd.
107 Cheapside
London EC2V 6DN

or

Phone: +359 800 46049
Email: info@trading212.com
Address: 3 Lachezar Stanchev Str.
Litex Tower, floor 10
Sofia 1756, Bulgaria

My advice is to contact them directly using the above email so you can get account specific details.

#9

I Always prefer these kind of things to be communicated publicly.

Thanks for your info anyway.

Truelayer is a 3rd party used by Trading212.
They handle the payments.
Hence why I’m curious as to what happens with the information.

This is not a weird question to ask and it should be answered by a quick yes or no.

Does trading212 sell user data to third parties or not?

If so, what type of data is being sold

Where can I find more information about this because it’s clearly not in the privacy policy.

This should be public information. Not information on request.

1 Like
#10

That concerns personal information. Trading data isn’t personal information, in fact the privacy policy has basically nothing to do with controls over selling data that isn’t personal information so doesn’t really answer the question around the sale or use of other data created by users that isn’t PII.

#11

If the information isn’t anonymised and contains personal information that is subject to GDPR.

If the trading data is general and cannot be linked to an individual then obviously it doesn’t.

None of this relates to sharing with the appropriate tax authorities etc.

#13

As far as I understand (no proof), T212 is just an app using the Interactive Brokers API. If I would have to guess they probably paying to use the api for this kind of traffic.

Robinhood is doing payment for orderflow which is basically routing the orders to fast trading companies to make a profit from the order until they execute it and return it. Who
ever pays the highest for the orders gets them.

T212 is headed for a freemium service at a later stage and maybe that’s how they plan to monetize the service…

#14

Do you mean robinhood selling actual order flow? aka “payment for order flow”? If so 212 do not do that and have said on this forum they do not do that. In fact, its pretty heavily regulated in the EU and as such isn’t a common practice like it is in the US

If you are referring to other data like popular holdings then that is publicly available data, so can’t see why anyone would be paying for it, can’t imagine it would be particularly useful data to the likes of hedge funds either. IB (who 212 use for orders etc.) do not sell customer trading data either according to what I could find online.

Also, TrueLayer are FCA regulated and are to enable open banking connections - I very much doubt an FCA regulated entity is selling banking information but you can read their policies here if you wish https://truelayer.com/privacy/#section_personal_data

Edit: purely out of interest, if your broker was selling anonymised/aggregated trading data to hedge funds, what exactly would be the issue? As a retail investor I can think of precisely ways that would harm you (unless of course we are talking about selling order flow itself, which there are various articles available online detailing potential disadvantages, with many articles arguing the opposite too).

#15

Your last question is a very good one.

This whole question occured to me because of an in depth Dutch article about the stock market being in some sort of bubble right now. In a small paragraph she mentioned that the current state of the market is being boiled up because of digitalized market trends.

In that article, the author mentioned Robinhood selling their user data to leverage funds.

You see, when you have the mean trend of Robinhood flowing as a big data catalyst for buying put or call CFD’s at light speeds… It’s basically legal inside trading, because when anonimized the trading data is not private info.

However, why you should be concerned about this, is because it DOES effect the market. It basically multiples the trend by a factor of whatever the CFD was bought for…

Whenever something is free, you are usually the product.

I don’t really mind it that much, it should however be very clear in my personal opinion that your behaviour on this platform is being monitized if that is the case.

#16

Yeah one source of payment could be our user data. What stocks are you looking at? What do you have in your wishlist? What stop orders do you have? What limit orders do you have?

All of this combined from 400k users is quite powerful info

#17

If 212 is selling user data, and I don’t know because like the OP I haven’t fully read the T&C, I do not mind as long as it is anonymised.

The reason being, 212 are providing us potentially the cheapest platform to trade listed stocks, even in small quantities. Any other features they add to this I consider a bonus and very much welcomed.

#18

212 have said on this forum they do NOT sell orderflow data like you are describing. You can also read online that IB do not sell customer data. Aggregated/anonymised data such as top holdings is available as I mentioned see here Hotlist - Trading 212

Yes but in my reply I said there is no significant impact on you as a retail investor UNLESS we are talking about selling orderflow - but that isn’t an issue because 212 are not selling orderflow.

#19

I can see that you have started an interesting discussion here. However, I have to stress that Trading 212’s business model is not based on selling order flow. This is not one of our practices.

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#20

Hi @Rumen thanks for hopping in.

So just to be clear: Trading 212 is NOT selling user data?

Simple yes or no will do :slight_smile:

#21

that’s what he said…