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Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

themarkup.org

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Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#41

Post by dauut »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #23
dauut wrote: post #9

A genuine question: why does this matter for customers? Is there any foreseeable bad outcome for customers?

> Is there any foreseeable bad outcome for customers? Mostly: better advertising means you're most likely to be duped into wasting money on things you don't want, or making suboptimal purchasing decisions, making your life worse over time. But also: insurance companies and banks could use your grocery purchase habits to adjust your premiums or loan rates based on e.g. whether or not your purchases indicate a healthy…

Thank you for your answer, I appreciate it. Insurance related concerns sounds serious. I couldn’t think of that.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#42

Post by mark_l_watson »

Well, as long as people realize their data is sold by food markets, I am personally OK with it. That said, to not get the discounts (thus not sharing your information) is leaving money on the table.

Also, if you are not part of a loyalty program, and you use a credit card, it is very possible that your purchases are still tracked - all it takes is cooperation between store and credit card company.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#43

Post by dauut »

toss1 wrote: post #38
AlexandrB wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe - insurance companies could start using your shopping habits to inform your risk group and therefore premiums. I could see other nefarious uses like tracking when female customers get pregnant for purposes of enforcing abortion bans or targeting of individuals by anti-abortion groups. I think it's a mistake to underestimate the imagination of insurance adjusters and bureaucrats when it comes to how personal dat…

Yup, this is definitely on the table since I just read the headline this morning that VA Gov Youngkin announced his opposition to a bill that would prevent law enforcement from seeking and collecting menstrual cycle data [0]. IOW, the governor of a major state (and the party that likes to tout "small government") is fully onboard with tracking your most intimate health data in order to prosecute people for medical de…

Thank you for both of your answers. I see that mostly health and insurance related concerns are valid and serious.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#44

Post by superkuh »

No they aren't. I buy my food (and everything else) with cash.

When my local grocer jacked up prices and introduced a customer loyalty card to drop the prices back down to normal I found out their online system for generating the card barcodes always followed the same couple URLs. So I could just skip the customer information page, type the next URL, and get the barcode without any information in their system. Eventually I wrote a perl script to automate scraping and printing the bar codes and would use a new one every time I went shopping. Luckily the store stopped the program after a few years. I guess if human eyes looked at the data they could have figured out the "null null" customer was the same anonymous person but I doubt human eyes looked.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#46

Post by the_jeremy »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #32

> Location: Your precise physical location in the store (with your consent), including when you enter and leave a store (Kroger app, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons inside stores) Can someone comment on how a store can identify my Bluetooth address if I never pair with anything in the store? Do apps have access to the Bluetooth MAC? If the app is not running, can the store still identify you using Bluetooth? Is there some…

If you have bluetooth on, beacons can try to connect and track your movement throughout the store. With Apple and Google both instituting rolling bluetooth mac addresses, this doesn't persist across the whole visit to the store, but will still let them see how long people stand in front of the cookies or how quickly they pass by the eggs.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#47

Post by algoatecorn »

raydiatian wrote: post #8

Honestly… if we could figure out how to separate agriculture and groceries from the rest of the economy, we’d be a happier species. It’s so fucked up that the ability to feed yourself is tied to a dick measuring contest between a handful of ultra wealthy.

In what way?

That's an interesting idea, but I can't think of how that would help.

It's a balance between economies of scale without cartel formation vs fragmentation and inefficiency.

Food prices are incredibly low due to consolidation and efficiency of farms and retailers. Just look at food spending as a percent of income over time.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#48

Post by deafpolygon »

WE knew this for years. Loyalty cards have been used to track data about you for a long time, but now they're learning how to sell it- paired with your debit card (probably backed by VISA) they can correlate and track your purchase history across multiple stores.

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#49

Post by kspacewalk2 »

kornhole wrote: post #29

Sometimes it feels ridiculous how much OPSEC I need to employ to buy anything at the grocery store. I walk or bike to the store to not reveal a license plate. All radios and sensors on my handset are turned off. I wear a mask to thwart facial recognition cameras. I pay cash.

But... why?

Re: Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You

#50

Post by psanford »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #32

> Location: Your precise physical location in the store (with your consent), including when you enter and leave a store (Kroger app, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons inside stores) Can someone comment on how a store can identify my Bluetooth address if I never pair with anything in the store? Do apps have access to the Bluetooth MAC? If the app is not running, can the store still identify you using Bluetooth? Is there some…

There are a number of methods that "work" to varying degrees. For bluetooth, stores can install ble beacons that a phone app can detect (if it has permission) and then get a rough estimate of the general area in the store you are in.

For wifi, stores can detect your phone's probe requests to estimate your location. If you are not associated to the store's wifi network your probe requests will use a randomized mac address (at least with ios and pixel devices). This means they probably won't be able to identify you as a new vs returning customer.

Stores also use cameras to track path traversal throughout a store. These paths are difficult to tie to an actual identity so are generally used in aggregate and not for more targeted marketing.

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