101–110 of 294 posts
Tracking by credit card is so effective that some companies, such as Safeway (*in Canada), have ceased their loyalty card programs. Loyalty card programs are redundant and must offer incentives for consumers to choose to use them. Now, no such incentives have to be offered to the customer to obtain the same data.
Tracking by credit card is so effective that some companies, such as Safeway (*in Canada), have ceased their loyalty card programs. Loyalty card programs are redundant and must offer incentives for consumers to choose to use them. Now, no such incentives have to be offered to the customer to obtain the same data.
Safeway has not ceased their loyalty program.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of all the other possible parties that could have attempted this? Yup, I'd say I trust them the most.
I don't doubt one bit that they have people capable and probably even willing to get the crypto right. I _strongly_ doubt they have the corporate will or motivation to actually put it into production. I'd go so far as to say "getting it right" is antithetical to their (enormously profitable and deeply entrenched) business model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You never had a choice. Paying with plastic always meant that you were tracked and that data sold. If you don't like it, use cash.
Cash is tracked by the banks. It's usually pretty easy too, especially with things like coffee shops that take a lot of 20s and give a lot of 5s. Most people take out 20s, so it's pretty easy to know who was likely at some place at some day or week.
Safari ITP 2 doesn’t allow 3rd party cookies.
https://adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/ding-dong-third-party...
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/09/apple-tra...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You never had a choice. Paying with plastic always meant that you were tracked and that data sold. If you don't like it, use cash.
Cash is tracked by the banks. It's usually pretty easy too, especially with things like coffee shops that take a lot of 20s and give a lot of 5s. Most people take out 20s, so it's pretty easy to know who was likely at some place at some day or week.
If set A is the set of users shown ads for Merchant M, and set B is the set of customers at merchant M who purchased something, then this intersection can tell you what percentage of the ads were shown to people who made a purchase without revealing who made the purchase to A or revealing who was shown an ad to B.
There’s probably a way to do it with differential privacy as well but it might be less efficient.
Do I have a choice, other than cancelling all of my MasterCard cards? This business of tracking and profiling is increasingly evil. If I dystopically discovered that someone has been following me around all the time, writing down everything I look at or do or purchase, in public and at home, I could not tolerate it.
The problem is, and always has been, that in exchange for some paltry “rewards” you have no idea just who gets sold what, or for how long, etc.
And this is a major new problem primarily because of how big and pervasive Google is, and how they’re into every business. This means I’m no longer sharing a few silly restaurant purchases with buyers of that data in the restaurant business, I’m enabling a crazy machine-learned madness that is hyper-connected to literally everything else I do. This should be illegal but our laws are too slow to catch up with powerful tech.