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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is the less well understood aspect of robo-signing. And a variation in the Russian system, since in the US you don't get back a "signed agreement" instead you either accept the terms or your don't. If you change them you need to go to the bank and have them sign the changes, and that triggers a discussion about "What changes?" and that leads to the Bank saying, "Uh, no, guess you don't want a card, ok."

But in organizations where such things are routinely signed by a clerical worker and returned (things like alarm service come to mind) you can make these changes and sometimes get away with them. At least in one case where I asked the clerk at Safeway to sign off on an altered terms and conditions on their loyalty card the manager came over and said that nobody in the store was authorized to sign on Safeway's behalf.

Clearly that did not work for the Russian bank which has already had the agreement litigated.

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That's an interesting point.

We take credit card/bank card forms for granted in that nothing is returned to you except another copy of the same (hopefully) agreement, the card and monthly statement. Not the copy of the document you signed with their corresponding signature.

I wonder if this case will prompt some changes in the way they conduct their card affairs.

We take credit card/bank card forms for granted in that nothing is returned to you except another copy of the same (hopefully) agreement

Really? I'm surprised by that. In recent years I've only signed new bank paperwork as a company director, but in all cases where that happened in real time in a branch, I've asked that they make a photocopy of exactly what I signed for me to keep for my company's records. They have always done so immediately, without objection, and without the signed version leaving my sight.

Of course the discussion here has made be a bit curious, I wonder if you could "sign up banks" instead of having them sign up you. Lets say you mail a bank your preferred credit card contract to the bank, which basically said "by sending me a card you agree to the terms of this contract." and then layout the card contract you would be willing to accept. I wonder what the conversion rate would be. I'm guessing 0 but without evidence that is just a guess. Might be fun to run the experiment.

Do they still send cards in the mail? It would be interesting to see if something they sent as an unrelated advertisement would be covered by your contract if you can prove they received the contract and the card was mailed after.

This could be a whole new era of spam prevention, by being personally as full of it as every EULA. Just send out contracts, "by contacting me in any way you agree to the following...". Companies would be terrified to send anything at all to anyone.

Round here (ZA) its fairly common to see a party having a copy of the contract signed only by the counterparty. i.e. Each party ends up with a contract signed by the counter party. Technically that makes neither copy a valid contract, but - close enough I guess.

Here too. And has its sense. You have the proof the other party agreed the contract. I do not need to sign to demostrate I am too. My word right now is sufficient.

This reminds me of the diplomatic practices of ancient mesopotamia -- when an agreement between two city-kings was finalized, each king got a master tablet listing half the agreement -- all of his own obligations. At no point did a symmetrical tablet listing every clause of the agreement ever exist.

Depends on what a contract is. In most law systems the contract is not the piece of paper it's written on.

Fair enough. Now that I think about it, the half signed contract will likely stick but its going to be one hell of a day in court.

> I asked the clerk at Safeway to sign off on an altered terms and conditions on their loyalty card

What? Why?

They were pushing a loyalty card, I added the clause that they couldn't collect or use any behavioural data collected from this card in any marketing, coupon, or other research program, nor could they share that information with with anyone not employed as a full time employee of Safeway Inc.

They didn't go for it :-)

Back when my kids were young and we had a neighborhood baby sitting co-op, all the Mom's met once a week. We set up a program where we got 15 different cards, every week we put all the cards in a basket at the beginning of the get together, then everyone took a card when they left (the basket was shaken up to randomize cards). That gave everyone a card to use but only aggregate statistics on the whole group rather than individual statistics.

The name was always Jane Smith.

These days Safeway has "fixed" that practice by tying gas rewards to a particular card number. That forces people to use the same card if they want to get gas rewards. I don't know but I suspect it was in response to activities like ours which mitigated their efforts to collect data.

In grad school, there was one office door that had an envelope taped to it marked "Safeway shuffle" or something like that, with an explanation to take a card and leave a card. It had a similar effect.

I have had at least three Safeway cards issued to me without having filed any paperwork. Each time the card was issued the clerk asked whether I already had a card. I responded in the negative. The clerk pulled a card out from under the till or a drawer, scanned the card to apply a discount, and then handed me the card to keep.

In fact, you can often keep the activated card (at all kinds of stores) even if they do ask you to fill in some papers. Just ask to take the forms home to fill them in and return later and take the card, too.

This is true, and your buying instruments (unless you always pay cash) or even your time of purchase/store choice will correlate out those three cards as all "you". We are very much creatures of habit and this is what Safeway and people like Target rely upon.

Now without the baby sitting co-op to randomize data I've offered my card to people ahead of me in line who don't have one, but again the gas rewards are changing that equation as well.

They can still tie the card to you if you ever use a credit card with it.

Or pay by check.

I've long since avoided Safeway (going on two decades), but back when I both visited the store and had a card, but under a different name (usually some variant of "Fred Flintstone" or "Mickey Mouse"), I found that my actual name eventually ended up on the receipt if I every paid by check.

Lesson: don't pay by check.

Lesson: don't patronize stores with shopper surveillance cards.

Most recent notable experience: a few visits to Border's Books, in which the store's "loyalty card" was pushed ever more vigorously. I responded "no, the NSA's already listening to my phone calls and reading my emails, no need for them to get my reading list as well" (this was years before Snowden, though after the AT&T listening room was revealed). The cashier was impressed by my integrity, and commented as much, as I paid cash for my purchase.

The last time I was asked if I had their card was during the final week of the store's liquidation sale. And I was thinking 1) why even bother and 2) where will that data go after the company shuts down (it turns out it was bought by Barnes & Nobel, which may itself go the way of Borders before too long).

So. Yeah. I'll pass.

Or you enter a competition [with card number] or use a coupon they posted out to you.

Many stores let you enter your phone number on a keypad if you've forgotten your loyalty card at home. If you don't feel like signing up for a store's card to get a discount, just try entering 867-5309 (from the Jenny song) in your local area code. 99% of the time it works!

For anyone who asked my phone number i always used 555-1212 which was the 'universal' number for directory assistance for a long time. If people questioned it I said, call that number, ask for me, they will tell you the number to call :-)

As a non-USian who does not know this system, can somebody please explain what "gas rewards" are and why they would prevent the kind of card shuffling explained by ChuckMcM?

Depending on your purchases at Safeway (grocery store) a partner gas (petrol) station (Chevron) will give you $0.10 - $0.80 discount per gallon of gas. For that to work you have to present to the gas station the same Safeway "club card" that you used to buy your groceries.

The size of the discount is tied to the amount of purchases made with that card present. So if you make a lot of purchases you get a bigger discount per gallon at the gas station.

If you share the card or exchange it with others, the first one to use the discount gets that savings, the next person does not. The discount resets on use, and it can be re-established by the next set of purchases on the card.

What that does is creates an economic incentive for someone to use the same card (maximize purchases to maximize discount) and not share it (discount is one time only, and to the current holder of the card.)

Something like $0.10/gal off, and tied between your Safeway loyalty account and credit card you use to buy your gas.

oh, you mean petrol? I thought safeway was in the business of supplying natural gas to homes.

you could still pool all the cards and split the reward between you, couldn't you?

Safeway would be considered a grocery store or supermarket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grocery_store

In the US, most large grocery store offer a card that you can use which gives you various rewards, and in turn allows them to perform analytics on their customer base.

Historically, these rewards were related to coupons for products in the store. However, this means that there is no benefit to using your particular card instead of someone else's.

More recently, the grocery stores have added other bonuses. The one that I'm most familiar with is for fuel / petrol. They team up with some fuel brand, say exxon, and when you've purchased enough on your loyalty card, you get something like $0.05 of your per gallon fuel costs.

The scheme with the poster above breaks down, because you need the physical loyalty card to use the fuel discount, and it's unlikely that everyone is refueling their car an equal amount each week, and that everyone is purchasing an equivalent amount of product at the store each week.

What are you people so afraid of? It's standard marketing. You go in a database with millions of others and your data is aggregated and analyzed. Nobody is hunting you down based on what products you purchase from the grocery store.

Are you so sure that the data couldn't be useful in the future? Perhaps the grocery and health insurance industries might team up to identify folks with unhealthy diets, or unusually high consumption of prescription or OTC medications.

Hopefully our representatives will pass laws preventing such things. Many systems in the US are flawed, but hopefully we are moving in the right direction and our privacy will be protected by consumer protection agencies. Yes, everyone who signs up for programs such as rewards cards are able to find out the stipulations and use of data, but it's unreasonable to assume that every participant can predict the full scope of their actions.

Same goes for every one of the thousands of products we purchase, isn't it a waste of time, money, and national health to put the responsibility of researching products and services in the hands of individuals? Why are companies allowed to sell me snake-oil, cigarettes, and other harmful products?

Why isn't there a law that prevents marketing data from being tied to personal identifiable information?

http://blog.chron.com/frugalconfessions/2011/09/mined-consum...

and

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

Show that individual data can be and is accessed.

That's a really clever way to randomize the data!

Some people aren't as good as some other people at picking their battles, was my takeaway.

There are significant security flaws in the ways that contracts are traditionally executed. This case illustrates just one of those flaws. Other flaws include alteration after signing, signature copying and forgery, and repudiation (meaning "I didn't sign that"). Most of these arise from the information security weaknesses inherent in paper documents and emailed PDFs.

I have given a lot of thought to this problem. I even had a startup once devoted to solving it. My current thinking is that some form of digital signatures--perhaps PGP--is the best solution to all of this. As I discussed in a previous HN thread, we have a long way to go before the PGP user experience is acceptable for most computer-literate people. (When I say "user experience," I mean much more than the GUI. I mean the whole process of learning about PGP, creating keypairs, signing keys, etc..)

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