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Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

> But you may as well. By giving them a CC# you're allowing Amazon to spy on you anyway -- and that's not even mentioning the copious surveillance in such stores in the form of cameras and behavior detection.

Ha! They already have a decade of my purchase history from being a Prime customer and I shop using an Amazon Credit Card. They've got everything they need and I don't mind.

Few people would be bothered by something like this. If they would be bothered, we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.

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> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases.

In my area, anyway, a huge outcry happened when these programs began to be adopted. Even now, eyeballing people checking out at the local shops, I'd say that only half of people (at most) are using loyalty cards. And many people I personally know who use loyalty cards do so in a manner to subvert the data collection (usually by having one loyalty card that is used by many people).

So it seems to me a substantial percentage of people really are bothered by them.

Really you only have to use a (loyalty card, credit card) pair once for them to correlate all your purchases. But even then, I bet (store ID, name from credit card) is sufficiently unique in many cases to identify you.

I don't use a loyalty card at any of the stores I shop at, and anecdotally, there's about a 50% chance that if I say "no" when the cashier asks if I have a card or want to create an account, I will later on discover that they've used a store code to give me the same discount.

This is without any prompting on my end, I never ask a cashier to do this for me.

So apparently it's common enough that some cashiers on-instinct just stick a store card in whenever someone says "no". It's common enough that none of them look at me surprised when I refuse.

Ah, something that tracks you based on appearance, and can later do so outside stores, is very different from a keychain fob that you can register with 555-867-5309.

I, for one, won’t ever go in an Amazon Go store. If other stores implement this tech without an opt-out, I will either start shopping in a ski mask or go without.

> 555-867-5309

Just FYI, the local area code and Jenny's number (867-5309) is a default that exists for most loyalty programs. So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that. I've heard that this was implemented for military folks who tend to be a lot more transient than regular locals.

> So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that.

Or just not use anything at all. Or do what I do, and prefer shopping at stores that don't have a loyalty program. In my area, stores that have loyalty programs also have higher prices so that the "discount" from the loyalty card makes the price roughly the same as at similar stores that don't have a loyalty program.

So I go to the stores that don't have one. That's not only better for privacy, but is more frictionless and comes with no price penalty.

> Ah, something that tracks you based on appearance, and can later do so outside stores, is very different from a keychain fob that you can register with 555-867-5309.

That's a fair argument, but I think Amazon has enough about me that what you're suggesting is a minor concern relative to what they already have.

I'm much more concerned about my Amazon search history getting leaked as a .txt file than I am about Amazon using imagery of me to train their ML models.

> we'd see bigger noise about grocery store loyalty programs which are basically to track purchases

You'd be surprised how few people actually ever think about the motivations behind such loyalty programs. If you asked, they'd probably say it's good for the shop as it keeps us going to the place where we get discounts though these cards instead of the competitors (hence, "loyalty"). Most of them most definitely don't know how valuable that data is and how it can be used and for what purposes.

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