> Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type
All merchants that accept credit cards are placed in a category by the card companies, and every credit or debit card purchase therefore gets this category attached to it. Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. I have Chase, and they have a pretty shitty UI for this, but there's something there at least.
So it's not unique to Discover, and it's not them "guessing" or trying, it's based on fixed merchant categories.
It's even codified and part of ISO standards [1]. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply Discovercard putting a UI around data that's already being collected.
All merchants that accept credit cards are placed in a category by the card companies, and every credit or debit card purchase therefore gets this category attached to it. Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. I have Chase, and they have a pretty shitty UI for this, but there's something there at least.
So it's not unique to Discover, and it's not them "guessing" or trying, it's based on fixed merchant categories.