Small restaurants rely on postcards sent to targeted addresses in the neighborhood to get off the ground. I can appreciate those. Is that targeted?
This is different than surveilling people's private and intimate communications, building a profile from those, then targeting against those built profiles.
In the case of internet and Google, we are being stripped of that basic choice. Google's browser, browser extensions, cdn, site analytics, dns, their prepackaged apps that are hard to uninstall on Android, all these are making it virtually impossible to walk away from that "loyalty program".
There may be people who like personalised advertising and I think they should have the choice to let Google and other internet companies scrape all the personal data they can from them in exchange for targeted ads. I'm not one of them. I want to surf the internet on my terms. I want to pay for the services I like to use like I do now for those that are available and uninstall apps from my devices without breaking warranty from my mobile manufacturer. I want that choice. After all, that's what life is about. If anyone says that we can't find that middle ground where people like me can browse the internet without personalised ads, then fuck personalised ads.
I can always not use the loyalty card if I really want a purchase to be private, but that would only be really true if:
- I approached the store not using any type of vehicle with a government identifier that could be potientially observed or tracked,
- I paid cash,
- I wore a disguise to not show up on the store's security cameras or be recognizable to others,
- and I didn't bring a cell phone and/or any other device broadcasting a MAC address to a potential sniffer.
I half-wonder whether there's a more pernicious plan which actively wants customers to know they're being tracked, on the assumption that if they see their purchases as contributing to a persistent profile with unknown distribution, they'll try to curate that profile to make themselves "look good" the same way they do on Facebook etc. Don't want everyone to think I'm a cheapskate, better buy that more expensive brand even though I can't taste the difference...
2. Grocery stores are retail. They spend money on bulk product, mark it up, then sell it. Why would a grocery store simply not stock things it doesn't want people to buy?
3. If there is some master plan behind the scenes, who's paying the grocery store to keep product it's trying to shame people into not buying with loyalty cards?
To your 1, I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised. "Value" own-brand ranges are typically packaged to look cheaper and cruder than fancier lines. The cardboard costs the same either way.
To your 2 and 3, it's about capturing consumer surplus, not stopping value sales altogether. The customer who can only afford the cheapest lines will still buy the cheapest lines. The one who could afford something a bit more upscale, but wouldn't normally care enough, might be nudged.
And looking further into the dystopian future: what if it becomes more than just status anxiety? What if buying the "wrong" things affects your (social?) credit score, or your health insurance premiums?