Hacker News Reader

Comment by rationalist | Hacker News Reader

And that's why I pay cash and use Jenny's Number with the local area code for the store discount program.

I know Target also tracks your cellphone through the store too, I haven't bothered putting in airplane mode when I shop, so hopefully they aren't correlating that with the purchases.

View on HN

This reminds me. At Safeway, for the longest time, I used this number scheme to regularly get 50 cents off or more a gallon on gas. I guess lots of people in my area used this number, maybe realizing it, maybe not, but it aggregated alot of savings at the pump.

Then suddenly one day, it just never happened again. Maybe they got wise to the practice, i don't know, but it stopped being valid

This is fine, but it's not really about tracking you, it's about tracking the habits of shoppers in aggregate, of which you are a participant. (Yes, having your real address to mail flyers is a bonus but not the end goal.)

The only viable solution that comes to mind is to shop at places that don't perform this sort of tracking/loyalty card/etc. and continue to pay in cash. The only stores around me that fit this bill are convenience stores and a chain ran by an Amish conglomerate.

> his is fine, but it's not really about tracking you, it's about tracking the habits of shoppers in aggregate, of which you are a participant. (Yes, having your real address to mail flyers is a bonus but not the end goal.)

Like hell it is. This is an article about Target back in 2012, that identified a pregnant underage girl purely from her purchasing record. 11 years ago.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Target also made their own payment terminals so they could get PII from your cards, and then make a virtual loyalty card from that data. Walmart did similar as well.

> The only viable solution that comes to mind is to shop at places that don't perform this sort of tracking/loyalty card/etc. and continue to pay in cash. The only stores around me that fit this bill are convenience stores and a chain ran by an Amish conglomerate.

With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, cash won't even save you.

What will save us? Strong federal laws similar to the GDPR.

"With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, .."

Meanwhile in Switzerland

https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-expat-news/facial-r...

It’s never a nice feeling to think you are being watched, even if it is in a public place like the centre of a city or train station. Now, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the main public transport provider in Switzerland, has announced that it will be installing facial recognition cameras in 57 stations across the alpine nation - however, according to the company, the system only wants to know your spending habits and how often you visit each station. SBB to instal cameras to gather more data on passengers

According to 20 Minuten, SBB wants to use the cameras to “obtain high-quality data that can be used to analyse the movement of people at train stations." Unlike the 700 cameras already operating in SBB stations, the new technology will allow the international company to track all passengers individually and in more detail.

SBB said that the cameras will capture and analyse the following data sets:

    Passengers' age, size, amount of luggage and whether they have any special items (e.g. prams, wheelchairs, bicycles)
    Their route through the station
    How long each passenger remains in the station
    Customer behaviour in station shops (purchasing habits, anti-social behaviour, etc)
    Which shops are visited by passengers the most
    How much passengers spend in station shops

That is not necessary any more now.

Now, when there are riots, it is well known that police has human "super-recognizers", which can scan thousands of photos and identify suspect individuals on a whim.

Yet at the same time that one of these persons has this ability and ends up working for the police is a low probability event, the police only tend to use said profiler if the event warrants the expense. When a service moves from human ran to technology ran it generally goes from "I need to do this special thing" to "We should just leave it on and do it all the time, the IT budget takes care of that".

This is far more acceptable than facial recognition systems.

That's just an investment to protect Davos more effeciently against future protests.

This one got a lot of coverage for how accurate it was, but we just ignore when it gets it wrong. For example, I've recently gotten a few mailings about signing up for Medicare once I retire in a few months - except I'm like 30 years away from it.

But the point of it is that it shows they're targeting individuals, not just collecting aggregate numbers. How good they are at the targeting isn't important.

>Walmart did similar as well.

Yep, I get emails about walmart purchases when I rarely go there, because I once made an account to order something online for a discount. I'm not even using the same cards anymore and they still know its me.

> With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, cash won't even save you.

Would be interesting to see the drop in positive face recognition rate (per human detected) from mask usage.

The stores would not need to do any of the stuff they do to track shoppers in aggregate. They have been doing aggregate tracking and collection since like the 80s. This is about pushing up the numbers EVEN MORE by doing specific targeting. My local supermarket has machines that push arbitrary "coupons" based on what you buy and your history, and I assume based on whatever rules the buyers of those advertisements/"coupons" want to implement.

> it's not really about tracking you, it's about tracking the habits of shoppers in aggregate, of which you are a participant. (Yes, having your real address to mail flyers is a bonus but not the end goal.)

What gives you the confidence to announce this? Do you have inside information?

It is definitely about tracking SPECIFICALLY YOU.

Target, one of the largest retailers in the US, has already abused tracking to increase targeted advertising to expecting mothers. https://bit.ly/3S3hlrA

> it's not really about tracking you, it's about tracking the habits of shoppers in aggregate, of which you are a participant.

I don't think this is accurate, but it doesn't matter. Even if that's true, it may not be true with the companies they sell or share the data to.

I googled "Jenny's Number" thinking it was a SaaS platform

I’ll save the next person some googling - it is a hit song from 1981 by Tommy Tutone.

https://youtu.be/tHL2XeuA6Yg

Here’s a few examples of what happened to people who had that number:

In 1982, WLS radio obtained the number from a Chicago woman, receiving 22,000 calls in four days.

In 1982, Southwest Junior High School received up to two hundred calls daily asking for Jenny in area code 704.

More examples on Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny

Tommy Tutone gave up pop stardom and became a programmer. It would be really cool if he created a SaaS platform called "Jenny's Number".

OMG! I finally figured out what all that fuss was about at this past year's DEFCON(DC30) about "Calling Jenny". I didn't call Jenny! :O

Yeah, not quite sure what I was expecting.

Where can we buy this data?

Let’s say someone shops for baby clothes locally, and my family runs a day care center in that same location. How can we actually market to them? Does the store use their credit card purchases and tie them to a way to actually contact this person, like an email?

There are oodles of data brokers out there: axciom, neustar, etc. Facebook ads would be the quickest way for a small time daycare to target to local shoppers.

We tried it. Just got a lot of spammers calling to offer their own services.

Specifically want to target people who bought baby stuff, or went to a pediatrician etc. Considered approaching local paediatricians to cross-promote.

The ideal would be if there are public records of births in the local hospitals, do those exist? Then one could look who was born 2 years ago and send a mailer to the address listed (by name) or call the number listed (in some phonebook) for those who opted in.

Any baby registries on Amazon or something publicly accessible?

I’d appreciate any ideas you all might have. I want something that is legally available. What do these data brokers actually sell?

The reality is, if you have to ask for this info, they won't sell to you. These companies gatekeep the data because making it hard to see just how fucked up things are helps keep calls for regulation down.

We are a single small company that delivered our product through emails. Even with just that data set, the amount I can find out about hundreds of thousands of individuals and connect them and essentially analyze the metadata for lots of fun things is absurd. I'm not even looking at google analytics for this kind of stuff.

In Germany Amazon, Rossmann, Hipp, and Budni give out baby boxes each worth maybe 5-20€ of baby stuff in exchange for the birthdate and parental details.

Perhaps check their privacy info to find who they share/sell the data with/to.

You should be alright if Bluetooth and WiFi are off. Unless you think they're spoofing a cell tower.

I am not aware of any stores that use anything other than BT or WiFi. But if they wanted to spoof a cell tower, it's certainly not technically hard. You can buy a device to do it for a few hundred dollars. It's very illegal, of course.

But if they wanted to use your cell emissions for tracking, they wouldn't even need to spoof anything at all. They'd just have to passively listen to your phone talking with real towers.

Does one need to spoof a tower (actively transmit/handshake) or can one simply listen? Is it virtually impossible to do some kind of phased array that tracks the location of mobile transmitters since they're encrypted? Maybe the transmissions aren't frequent/continuous enough unless the user is actively using data or on a call... I'm sure many people here know way more than I.

> Is it virtually impossible to do some kind of phased array that tracks the location of mobile transmitters since they're encrypted?

A phased array can still provide positioning reports even if it can't decipher the data. And, well, doing so would be illegal.

Frankly, I'd use facial recognition combined with a phased array to realtime plot people in a facility. And if they use their credit card, I'd then connect the CC, their face, the pattern they walked, and to the free wifi the store provides to get access to phone-OS data.

Now you can realtime track all your customers who show up. And that data gets sold to whoever buys. Hmm, buying unhealthy food from your receipt? Your insurance company bought the list and will now raise rates on you.

Hopefully my insurance company doesn't have another customer who shares my name, who has those bad habits, with the matching being fuzzy enough that the raised rates are applied to both of us...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher

FYI, Jenny’s number is 867-5309.

Entertainingly I -used- to do this at Walgreens, except now they started asking to verify the zip code associated with the account. :-)

90210 of course. Although if you're customizing the area code based on current location, maybe do the same with the zip code.

You laugh about this, but - a story from my younger years that people call bullshit on all the time:

I worked for a (now out of business) retailer. They collected zip codes from folks who didn't have their version of a loyalty card. They used this data to inform automatic shipments of seasonal and/or regional merchandise. They were usually pretty good at hitting just in time sales for annual festivals, fairs, those sorts of things.

One year, we received surf boards, shorts, and skin-care products for sun exposure in January. In Iowa. In January. It turned out that our "privacy minded" (read: militia lite) area had stuffed that system so full of 90210 zip code that the automatic routing and warehouse system was sending us the merchandise for southern California.

It was amazing. And so, so stupid. (they're out of business for many reasons, executive level stupidity being the leading one)

That's so funny, I would have loved to se that SALE in the middle of the winter. With a sign that said something like "90210 SPECIAL SALE".

Let us know if you figure it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com