“…E.g., Amazon rewards consumers that share receipts of purchases outside Amazon; Alibaba and WeChat provide widely used means of payment in China; and Meta has explored digital currency issuance (Libra and Diem).2 See, e.g, Agarwal and Assenova (2022), Allen et al (2021), Babina et al (2022), Beck et al (2022), Berg et al (2020), Dalton et al (2023), Frost et al (2020), Ghosh et al (2022), Hau et al (2019), Huang et al (2020), and Ouyang (2022).3 Although the value of digital privacy in general is empirically debated(Acquisti et al, 2016;Athey et al, 2017;Bian et al, 2022;Chen et al, 2021;Goldfarb and Que, 2023;Tang, 2023), for payments and lending specifically, most studies find an important role for privacy. See, e.g.,Bijlsma et al (2022Bijlsma et al ( , 2023,Borgonovo et al (2021), ECB (2021),Engels et al (2022), Hu et al (2023), and Li (2023 on privacy and payment choice; and Tang (2023) andDoerr et al (2023) on borrowers' willingness to pay to limit the intrusiveness of data disclosure in loan applications.4 Studies reporting extensive heterogeneity in privacy preferences includeBian et al (2022),Collis et al (2022),Goldfarb and Tucker (2012),Lin (2022),Lin and Strulov-Shlain (2023),Prince and Wallsten (2022) andŠkrinjarić et al (2022).5 Our analysis does not hinge on cash being the alternative or payments being the only source of credit quality data. As shown in Appendix B.1, the key assumption is that the issuer's means of payment reveals more credit quality information, not that it is the unique source of such information.…”