The poverty of privacy – supermarket loyalty cards | Hacker News Reader

The poverty of privacy – supermarket loyalty cards

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28 pointstaubek10 comments

>It's really got me thinking about the 'poverty of privacy'. For people struggling to put food on the table .. the loyalty card is quite appealing, especially when the Tesco 'Clubcard' is now also a mobile app offering convenience. But at what cost to people's privacy?

Can't you just... not install the app? I imagine most people already have the card, and that's already nearly as convenient (if not more) than whipping out your phone, unlocking it, finding the app on your homescreen and opening it.

There's some concerning things raised in this twitter thread (ie. you have to allow yourself to be tracked through their club card if you want good prices), but it's being drowned out by the author complaining about stuff like optional apps containing trackers and are missing privacy policy, that their websites are setting cookies when they're not supposed to, or that they're logging your IP address/user agent.

The problem is that in a lot of cases all they need is your agreement for your privacy to be violated - they don't need your data because it's already out there, they just need your permission to misuse it.

Not installing the apps doesn't prevent them from buying your data from various data brokers and feeding back to them.

How does a supermarket knowing my personal shopping habits negatively impact me, in concrete terms? I can only think of only one hypothetical downside: the supermarket sells my shopping data to malicious third parties, which adversely affects me in other ways (e.g. my health insurance premiums rise because I bought too much bacon). This would indeed be very bad, but it is currently a mere hypothetical.

As far as I can tell, supermarkets offer discounts in exchange for more fine-grained tracking of customers’ purchasing habits because it lets them better optimize their supply chains, nothing more, nothing less. I fail to see how this is a bad thing for customers.

> How does a supermarket knowing my personal shopping habits negatively impact me, in concrete terms?

Target notifies teen girl's father that she is pregnant: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Man falsely accused of arson in part because his shopping history included fire starters: https://michaelzimmer.org/2005/02/19/safeway-shopper-card-le...

Man claims that supermarket threatened to use this purchase history to call him an alcoholic when he sued them for injury: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-feb-11-fi-7017-...

Man's purchases of expensive wine used to increase his alimony payments in divorce court: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=17...

Some random third party rents a list of General Nutrition Centers Gold Card members and then puts their information up for sale: https://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2003/06/1...

My rule of thumb is, stores would not offer loyalty programs if it lost them money.

> e.g. my health insurance premiums rise because I bought too much bacon. This would indeed be very bad, but it is currently a mere hypothetical.

Regulations prevent this from happening with health federally and life in certain states. For now.

Insurance companies are dinosaurs but they're catching up. Lots of new VP and up AI/ML positions that report directly to the CTO office are spinning up. Suffice it to say that after my latest job search, which included senior roles at insurance cos, I switched to cash for sin purchases.

It's one thing buying too much bacon and another actually using it for personal consumption. You might as well be cooking it for your friends or your dog. This does not make sense.

> This does not make sense.

You're clearly not an actuary or -- more importantly -- an insurance exec. Just because there isn't a perfect causal link doesn't mean that the correlation isn't useful for minimizing risk.

I'd wager that at least a double digit percentage of young males are as careful as young females in their driving behavior. From the insurance perspective, who cares? The risk pool still pays a premium.

There are two three to consider here, when assessing potential negative impact:

(1) Data is forever. Just because something is fine now, doesn't mean it will always be fine in the future. Millions of women in states with abortion ban trigger laws thought the free cycle tracking apps with permissive privacy policies were a fair trade off. Now it might not be.

(2) It's not "just" your personal shopping habits. It's your personal shopping habits, combined with your cell phone location data, combined with your credit score... combined with your web search history... take a look at the Social Credit Score in China. 1.2B+ people whose data is combined and analyzed every second of every day. Think it can't happen here?

(3) If this data were only useful to the supermarkets themselves, why would it be sold to so many other companies? If this data is only valuable for optimizing supply chains, why do companies hire PhD-educated data scientists to do stuff with it? Seems like overkill if your objective is make sure you have sweetcorn on the shelf at the right time.

I don't know the UK equivalent, but the old directory assistance number in the US was 555-1212. I have literally never found a store in the US where putting (local area code)-555-1212 into the checkout machine didn't work.

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