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Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

I'd pay for an itemized list of all the stuff I've bought at the grocery store(s) over the last 6 months. I'd love that level of insight into budgeting what is my family's third biggest expense.

FWIW, none of the stores I go to have loyalty cards, though I'm pretty sure that they could do matching based on hashed card values or the name they get back from the card. (That's could, not that they do. I'm not sure if PCI would look at them sideways for hashing card values and using that as a key for a data store)

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There are a number of receipt scanning services which can provide what you're looking for (they are mostly B2B, but do what you basically suggest) https://www.shoeboxed.com/ http://www.neat.com/ etc...

Neither shoeboxed/neat provide itemized data.

A grocery store I visit has recently ended their loyalty card program. My assumption is that they're doing what you describe, and don't care much about the few people who pay cash. Tracking itemized purchases is probably critical business information at this point for any large chain.

I'm surprised there has been no leak of purchases from major restaurants or retailers, just credit card datasets.

Does the California law only require disclosure of leaks of financial information, or do businesses finally start taking proper security measures (and/or airgapping) when there is business intelligence at hand?

Its the former. Laws cover payment info. Also, payment info is more valuable to steal, and more compact to transmit and easier to decode from the raw storage data.

Once you have any security in place, it's probably more complicated to NOT include your payment database in it. PCI auditer will actively inspect your payment database attack surface.

Just curious, but what country/part of the country do you live in? Virtually every store I walk into either has a loyalty points system, a credit card, or both.

I've suspected loyalty points programs are just an accounting trick. You're creating your own currency which doesn't always get used up, and you can devalue whenever you need to make your quarterly numbers.

And if your program really catches on, you can get other retailers to sign on, creating a side business, or spin it off as a separate business if someone is willing to pay you for it (it's easy to segment off from your core business).

In general, store points and so forth are something that stores hope you'll perceive as being of greater value (and hence encourage loyalty) than they'll every have to actually deliver on.

The norm with grocery stores though seems to be more in the vein of giving instant savings to card holders. Some chains (Safeway out West is one of them I think) have so many and such deep special prices that I have a card even though I only shop there on vacation sometimes.

(Interestingly, Shaws--which is an Eastern US chain now owned by European company I believe--discontinued their card in this vein a few years back.)

An island outside Seattle. We don't have any large chain stores on the island. There are 4 grocery stores, all independent, serving a community of about 15k people. There's also only one fast food chain, a Dairy Queen.

The only loyalty card I actually use is the coop feed store, I think the hardware store might have one too, but I've never bothered with that.

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