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

Used this as my Kroger discount number for years. Someone else must have (with the same area code) because occasionally I'd get a big discount on gas, and there's no way I was spending enough to 'earn' that.

Consequences; when you have meaningful consequences around someone knowing what you purchased at the grocery store, you'll be justified in this behavior.

Until then, it's paranoia.

For my part, my "public" life has not once caused me negative consequences, and I've lived it this way for 34 years. Why would I live in fear of something that hasn't happened to me, anyone I know personally, is not recommended by any industry experts, is not presented as a risk factor by group responsible for my well being, etc.?

You need to prove that all of that extra effort is worth the degraded quality of life.

Not in my experience, in fact if you go to similar lengths to wipe cookies and hide your online identity using other additional methods, when I needed to locate a replacement AGM battery for the stop start tech in a car, the best prices I was quoted were £400-£500.

Then used an account with a known online history, ie cookies not wiped etc, search engines and online retailers came back with prices for £100.

So in my limited experience, going to the lengths I did to hide one's identity online will cost you 4x -5x the typical price.

In some respects, these companies have also put a price on the value of online privacy, which is handy to have.

As someone who has had a limited input into supermarket clubcards in the UK, there is a lot of personal data that can be gained from this information even if the supermarkets dont go to the lengths they could.

I dont think people would be happy with what could be extrapolated, like working out how rich a family or shopper is, health conditions before they even get detected by medical experts, what religion they are, have they been made redundant. There is just so much meta data we give away, its quite shocking really.

In the wrong hands, people could carry out their own stealth agenda's. Back in the 90's people were injecting chemicals or tampering with food which prompted food companies to start using foil seals and other methods to ensure food tampering is/was spotted easily. Things like tampering with baby food and liquids.

It also gives the police and security services via court orders, a ready made dataset in order to build any case against you. Its bad enough people can be psychologically profiled using streaming services like Netflix or Amazon or Youview and satellite services connected to the net, but I dont think people value privacy personally and they dont understand how they can be manipulated once some information is known about them.

At the same time, the state has never had access to so much data in order to better target populations to control or manipulate for their own purposes, like we see with election manipulations that saw Brexit and Trump get into power. I saw some of those social media adverts and it was extreme psychological manipulation and even the BBC were involved with some of that data collection on social media.

In my experience, some criminals will operate over decades, cultivating scams especially when large sums of money like asset acquisition is involved.

But if you block ads and third-party cookies, which I'm 146% you do with this mindset, that data collection is of no use either way.

I have a store like this nearby and try to give them as much of my business as I can. It's refreshing: no membership rewards nonsense, no unclear or deceptive volume sale pricing, high-quality produce and deli, everything is exceptionally clean, well kept, and efficient. The employees by all accounts and indications mostly really enjoy working there (not all teenagers enjoy it), and in four decades of shopping there I've never had a bad customer experience that wasn't caused by another customer.

It does cost a bit more, but some of that is inherent because they generally carry stuff that is genuinely better. Despite that, some products are still very competitively priced, and the administrative and cognitive overhead of shopping there is significantly lower.

Thus far they've kept the large chain Orwellian dystopia entirely at bay. My shopping behavior doesn't make much of an individual difference to society but it's worth a premium to get a better product and to not feel like I'm contributing to The Great Race to the Bottom of Everything™ when I shop there.