Credit card companies are ditching old-school travel alerts for always-on location tracking

Protecting my money while on the road now means sacrificing my privacy.

As I prepared to travel to four different countries to work remotely for four months far from my hometown in California, I figured I'd have to give my banks, as well as credit and debit card issuers, a heads-up. It's what fiscally responsible travelers do. Mostly, I didn't want any fraud alerts to go off the minute I used my card in my first stop, Chile, a hemisphere away.

I've always alerted my bank, Bank of America, whenever I've planned to travel to New York, Nevada, Canada, or really anywhere out of state, or beyond the U.S. But when I opened the BofA app a month before my international flight, the travel alert options were gone. Instead, I was prompted to turn on location services for the mobile banking app to "always." That way, if the app tracked me as being in Santiago, Chile, but my card was used in Valencia, Spain, my bank would know something was up.  Read more...