Ozempic Is Making People Buy Less Food, Walmart Says | Hacker News Reader

Ozempic Is Making People Buy Less Food, Walmart Says

bloomberg.com

15 pointsMattGaiser28 comments

Yep, definitely not the economy or inflation or anything like that

"a Walmart executive admitted that the company has been looking at anonymized customer data and finding that shoppers taking the diabetes drug and its weight loss management counterpart, Wegovy, are buying less food."

Do people in America get this drug through their insurance? Because it's very expensive and as I understand it Walmart is the US equivalence of Aldi.

Yeah, through insurance. Walmart sells most consumer goods - food, but also clothing, medicine and toiletries, sporting goods (including guns, in some places). Lots of people use their pharmacies, so presumably they're able to look at correlated sales of drugs and food purchases.

That seems ... bizarre. Does something like HIPAA not prevent companies from using pharmacy patient data against their regular sales info on the same person? I get It's supposed to be anonymized data, but how can they figure out who's buying Ozempic vs not for this specific comparison?

Welcome to the world of "clean rooms", often used with tricky consumer data like this [1].

I recently was a Tech PM for a large ad/marketing agency and we utilized them for effectiveness of movie goers for a large studio. Essentially, we wanted to see who saw our ads on social media _AND_ set top boxes _AND_ searched for the movie title in particular Zip codes.

Obviously highly specific data that fingerprints a single user wouldn't be given to us by Meta, Comcast, and Google (first-party data), but we can ship that data to a "clean room" who will venn-diagram it together to get us our ultimate numbers, per Zip code, to find effectiveness/reach.

Wal-mart being a first party with both of their doors (retail and pharmaceutical) presumably can do this all themselves with their own data scientists looking at register receipts.

[1] https://digiday.com/marketing/data-clean-room/

I’ve spent a bunch of time with HIPAA. It’s a lot less protective than most people think.

Practically (though it’s more nuanced), if data is truly anonymous, they can use it however they want. The challenge is getting data to be truly anonymous. It’s very difficult once you want to identify geographic or regional data. Age, gender, and zip code creates plausible identity in many places.

For HIPAA purposes, there is no such thing as anonymized info if someone can coax out zip code, gender, and birth date. That's the current SotA standard in terms of k-deanonymization.

And yes. BAA's apparently allow companies to throw that shit around like hot cakes. Remember, it isn't actually illegal until someone has been sued for it, and they lose (no settlement).

You can use the pharmacy data if the patient gives consent. And since nobody actually reads all that stuff they're probably consenting.

Even without consent you can use the anonymized data to do analysis.

Walmart is much more like Carrefour or even Tesco. They mostly sell big brands.

> anonymized customer data and finding that shoppers taking the diabetes drug

So the data was not very "anonymized".

There's no way to identify someone because you know they're taking a widely available drug

surely not!

Ozempic/Wegovy is expensive. I doubt very many people are net saving money here.

Not being obese and more healthy brings you much more life quality. It might be hard to comprehend for some Americans, but not everything in Life revolves around $

The theory is that they just don't want to eat as much (the drug suppresses appetite), not that they are trying to save money.

I first saw this article in 'The Daily Mail / UK' [0] a few days ago. I thought it was dark pattern advertising for a weight loss drug...

The DM article had pictures of a couple of attractive older women (skinny, the AFTER shot). Perhaps older women who feel overweight being the main target audience. Plus a picture of a (surprisingly) thin Elon Musk (ie; you too can be successful!)

Many of the comments on that page where people saying that buying less was the result of inflation. Something that makes far more sense. Maybe I'm just being cynical because a search just now [1] shows a few other sites parroting the same.

Or maybe Walmart has a vested interest in this drug because it feels like an odd thing to announce (a baseless claim?).

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12597849/Walmart-sa...

[1] https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=Ozempic+Is+Making+People+Buy...

https://archive.ph/wXBbx

So they are surveilling people they know are on the drug, and they are seeing those people buy less food. Wow. The surveillance bothers me a lot more than the fact Walmart might experience a slight downturn in the bottom line. Here's a non-paywalled recap of the story: https://futurism.com/neoscope/walmart-ozempic-food

It's just data analysis, the same way that other retailers do it for product recommendations. The only difference with more anodyne correlations (eg. people who buy cereal are also more likely to buy milk) is that they're using anonymized pharmacy data.

How is it anonymized if they are correlating it with how much food they are buying? Even if it is anonymized, I'm shocked healthcare data is shared?

It's not being shared. Walmart is both the pharmacy and the grocery store. If you use the same account to buy drugs and food from them, they can see that. Nobody needed to give them the data and they aren't giving it to anyone else.

Still seems fishy. Does the pharmacy section not require HIPAA and siloing off from the regular consumer data?

HIPAA doesn’t require that. Or not in the sense you are suggesting.

This seems like a pretty easy analysis while stating in the confine of HIPAA.

Your basically looking at two data points:

* is [drug] buyer

* total grocer spend

There is no PHI in that analysis and no way for there to be PHI.

Collecting anonymous data and sharing data with third parties are entirely orthogonal issues.

It could be transaction level data (eg. credit card ending in 1234 bought X at store Y).

It's anonymized in the sense that one can't know what medication Joe Blow takes just by looking at the dataset, even if their transaction data is part of it.

If such analysis is concerning, then one can choose to buy their medication elsewhere or pay cash without any rewards card.

It could also be face recognition of the person using security footage, no?

People who are motivated to loose weight both buy less food and are more likely to take Ozempic.

The third thing that's both mundane, obvious, and doesn't sell clicks strikes again!

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