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

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

#131

Post by Konnstann »

gnicholas wrote: post #64
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.

IME at Safeway if you don't use a "club card" you end up paying nearly double for many items. Are there ways around this?

Idk about Safeway but Stop n Shop/Giant lets you click "forgot my card" and get the discounts anyway, minus the reward points to your card

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

#132

Post by hunter2_ »

tarotuser wrote: post #34
hunter2_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does one need to spoof a tower (actively transmit/handshake) or can one simply listen? Is it virtually impossible to do some kind of phased array that tracks the location of mobile transmitters since they're encrypted? Maybe the transmissions aren't frequent/continuous enough unless the user is actively using data or on a call... I'm sure many people here know way more than I.

> Is it virtually impossible to do some kind of phased array that tracks the location of mobile transmitters since they're encrypted? A phased array can still provide positioning reports even if it can't decipher the data. And, well, doing so would be illegal. Frankly, I'd use facial recognition combined with a phased array to realtime plot people in a facility. And if they use their credit card, I'd then connect the…

Hopefully my insurance company doesn't have another customer who shares my name, who has those bad habits, with the matching being fuzzy enough that the raised rates are applied to both of us...

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

#133

Post by maccard »

jxramos wrote: post #122
Infernal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I’ve noticed multiple grocery store chains posting notices about how they no longer accept cash. A couple as of the new year.

hmmm, wonder if it's a preventing cash theft sort of thing with cashiers or something in that space.

It's a few things, most likely. It removes human error (did you give the cashier a $1 or $100 bill?), reduces risk of loss/theft of physical assets, reduces staffing costs (One person can operate one manual till, one person can operate 15? automated tills where they're basically just overriding weights and checking ID for alcohol), is probably _cheaper_ than handling cash (because you already have a visa/mastercard/payment provider contract who will give you discounts for increased volume, and they likely charge less because of the topic of this article).

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

#134

Post by count »

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…

Most folks just click 'accept' on any permissions dialog pop when using an app. They don't care what 'discover local network' or 'use bluetooth' means.

So, for many, it's just installing the app and it's collecting/signaling with their permission. Independently, your phone transmits on bluetooth frequencies with a MAC, and that MAC is unique to your phone, so while it might not be linked back to you by a specific app, other apps might report (say, they play bluetooth audio or something), and get indexed and correlated elsewhere.

https://www.skyhook.com check out something like this for more info...

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

#135

Post by tenebrisalietum »

theironhammer wrote: post #53
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.

Edward Snowden revealed that u need to remove the battery on ur phone to make it "safe", turning it off doesn't do the trick. [Which u can't do anymore]. As another commenter says: leave the phone at home.

Airplane mode has to be able to make it zero-emissions due to FAA regulations, right?

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

#136

Post by drdaeman »

devindotcom wrote: post #56
ok123456 wrote: post #4

Nothing really is done with this data, ultimately. It gets fed to 'analysts' who make models, and if those models don't agree with the decisions the executives are already making, it just gets ignored.

In one sense this is correct and why I personally stopped caring - what are they going to do with 5 years worth of my choice of cream cheese and apple varieties? But for other people it may be more revealing, of medical conditions, life changes, etc, especially when combined with other datasets. You moved from a one bedroom to a studio, started buying half as much milk and twice as many frozen pizzas, and take cars t…

That's not breakup, that's some new debt or loss of income. Or anything else, really. That's the problem with "big data" - at scale it might work, but at the individual level the only thing you can be sort of sure is that something is going on with this source, but not what it is.

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

#137

Post by nanidin »

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.

What is your threat model? Are you buying incriminating goods at the grocery store? What do you gain by putting yourself through all that? Or what are you preventing / protecting yourself from?

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

#138

Post by pessimizer »

gnicholas wrote: post #64
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.

IME at Safeway if you don't use a "club card" you end up paying nearly double for many items. Are there ways around this?

It should be illegal. If stores want to be open to the public, they shouldn't be able to force people to trade surveillance for cash discounts; grocery store shoppers are in no way qualified to evaluate either the short-term or long-term costs of selling their privacy, and not selling your privacy to every store you shop at becomes a permanent tax. If you want to offer discounts to members, stop selling to the general public and only sell to your membership.

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

#139

Post by tenebrisalietum »

account-5 wrote: post #6
rationalist wrote: post #3

And that's why I pay cash and use Jenny's Number with the local area code for the store discount program. I know Target also tracks your cellphone through the store too, I haven't bothered putting in airplane mode when I shop, so hopefully they aren't correlating that with the purchases.

You should be alright if Bluetooth and WiFi are off. Unless you think they're spoofing a cell tower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher

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

#140

Post by pessimizer »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #69
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.

They have your fingerprints!1!! Or are you wearing gloves? They have your genes. Or are you wearing clothing which limits the spread of particles from your skin and hair? Well. At least they could have. If they really wanted to. Or anybody else.

> Well. At least they could have. If they really wanted to. Or anybody else.

You're lying here. I guarantee that you, LargoLasskhyfv, do not even have the ability to keep a nationwide database of fingerprints and DNA, and of course you couldn't bear the expense of physically collecting a DNA profile or the fingerprints of everyone in the country no matter how much you "wanted to." Yet, you are a member of "anybody." Are you just an outlier?

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