Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
They can drive up the price on the items you always buy until you stop buying as much, or lower the price on certain high price items just enough to attract you to them before they start creeping prices back up. They can use data like what you've bought from them before as well as data like your income level, who the members of your household are, and what your shopping habits elsewhere are.
Store loyalty cards are seen as a great way to start collecting useful data and get consumers used to the idea that some people get (or even deserve to get) different prices than other people. Be cautious of any place that asks you to use an app or scan a QR code to see their menu or prices, and resist the idea that stores should be allowed to discriminate by charging certain people more than others for the same product.
The very idea is just revolting.
At least one good thing about supermarket oligopolies is that they'll need to abide by the strictest unit pricing state laws for the region they operate in.
> For example, ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, indicates that it could increase profits by 84% by experimenting with personalized prices (Wallheimer 2018). Other players, such as travel sites (e.g., Orbitz, HotelTonight; DeAmicis 2015; Mattioli 2012), retailers (e.g., Amazon.com, Home Depot, Staples; Streitfeld 2000; Val-entino-DeVries et al. 2012), and even grocery stores (e.g., Safeway; Clifford 2012) have also reportedly begun implementing personalized prices for their customers based on individual characteristics.
Here's an article on one grocery store's early efforts: https://risnews.com/safeway-offers-personalized-pricing-prog...
This is all just another means to get people accept that prices should be allowed to vary on an individual basis. I'd very much like for this to be illegal, but companies stand to make money hand over fist so I doubt it will happen.
I'm guessing it'd fall on the person who was overcharged to prove that it had anything to do with their race, and even then the company will hide behind the AI to avoid all responsibility. There are already many examples of AI found or suspected to be biased, but has anyone at any company been jailed or even meaningfully punished for using an AI that was found to be biased? It seems like the most you can expect is "We'll stop using that AI" after which they'll just fire up another one.
You are only correct in a SOCIALIST world where ONE market supplies everything.
Your nefarious visions ARE WRONG in a CAPITALST MARKET where the grocery store must COMPETE with another store down the street and the CONSUMER IS FREE TO CHOOSE where they purchase their goods.
All the regulatory barriers preventing new grocery stores from entering the marketplace reduce consumer's choices and drive the consolidation we see where Kroger buys up regional chains. These activities weaken labor negotiation power and consumer choice but somehow people call out for more intervention.
Increasing competition always and everywhere lowers prices and increases choice leading to higher living standards for consumers
Consumers are not free to choose where to get their goods. They are limited by practical restraints such as proximity and access. Food deserts exist in this country and they impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans. Millions live in food deserts and lack access to a vehicle.
You've also fallen for the myth that that just because competition could exist it means that industries will always act in ways that hurt their own profits in order to compete for each other's customers. History, and your own experience, should make it plain that this is a lie. Just because consumers want something doesn't mean that there will ever exist any company who will provide it, or provide it at scale, provide it to a comparable level of quality/utility, or provide it at a reasonable cost.
I want a cell phone carrier that doesn't collect and sell my personal information. They don't exist. I want a new car that doesn't come with computers, bluetooth, and any other high tech features. They don't exist. I want a streaming video service that offers every movie and TV show from the last 70 years for one low monthly rate. That doesn't exist.
The fact is that in our capitalist market consumer choice is severely limited by what the market has on offer. If something allows everyone in an industry to make money hand over fist they'll all implement that thing because it makes them vast amounts of money and their shareholders will demand that they do.
Consumers in the US are commonly unable to find a company willing to provide services that they want because in some cases it will always be more profitable for companies to not provide what consumers want.
If Personalized Dynamic Pricing makes grocery stores a fortune by screwing over their customers they will all implement it. Any weird one off co-op or independently run store that refuses will be of zero help to the vast majority of the population who cannot access it.
Regulations are a powerful tool that can be used to force companies to provide things for consumers that companies otherwise never would. Without regulations companies would be perfectly happy to sell people products that will kill them. Hell, even with regulations companies are often caught trying to sneak products filled with poisons like heavy metals into people's homes. You have personally benefited from regulations your entire life.
Sadly, they can also be abused by corporations who bribe politicians and infiltrate regulatory agencies so that they can keep out competitors, and that is a terrible thing, but of course the problem there isn't solved by making regulations impossible, but by getting rid of crooked politicians and forcing oversight onto agencies to ensure that they're working for the public good and not for the corporations.
Intervention is absolutely needed and we need much more of it, but we should be careful to make sure that they are the right interventions and that they are working to improve the lives of the people and not just the profits of the corporations who seek to exploit us at every opportunity.
So rude. Just like Experian and friends. Keeping detailed notes on me, and acting all surprised when I want to read them. It's like they are embarrassed I actually exist.
If I read your email and then selected "metadata" I found important, walked into a very busy public square, and started shouting your secrets you'd be right to be uncomfortable. If I, for example, made a reasonably accurate prediction that you are pregnant/on drugs/have ED/etc and then told 10,000 people about this you'd be right to be angry.
Yet...you're okay with a company doing any of this? Is it because you can't see it or feel it directly? The head in the sand approach doesn't work. With enough datapoints in one bin anyone can use "metadata" to make extremely accurate predictions about your private life. You need to defend yourself from the constant gathering of this metadata. Snowden warned us and apparently very few of us decided to listen. All it takes is one leak, one hack, one disgruntled employee, or one bad government to take all those secrets you're not thinking about and turn them into weapons to use against you. In a modern battlefield you are a target and the war has been going on for decades now.
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.
Also can be stated as "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."
No, nobody has to prove any such thing. This isn't an important issue to you -- that's fair. It is to others -- that's fair too.
You say "worth the degraded quality of life", but in my view, the degraded quality of life is always being under surveillance. Taking these measures improves my quality of life.
What I sacrifice is just a little bit of convenience. That's not a big hit.
And what you sacrifice is a lot of convenience, and a wholesale rejection by the very society you rely heavily on to survive. It's not tenable to live in this society and wear a ski mask while shopping in a grocery store.
I don't have to. It's sufficient for me to say that I strongly dislike it.
> Why share this belief if you can't defend it?
Why do you think this is something that needs defending?
Regardless, I think I have adequately defended it. It's an intrusion into my life that I don't consent to and I find highly objectionable. The reason I find it objectionable is exactly the same as the reason I object to someone following me around writing down everything I do, or peering into my windows at home.
> And what you sacrifice is a lot of convenience, and a wholesale rejection by the very society you rely heavily on to survive.
Neither of those things are true at all. I do not feel greatly inconvenienced, and I fully participate in society.
> It's not tenable to live in this society and wear a ski mask while shopping in a grocery store.
I agree. I don't do that. That said, if I'm aware that a store is engaging in facial recognition, I will choose to shop at a store that doesn't.
That, too, is engaging in the society I live in.
Edit: I think part of the problem we're having in our communication is that we're both coming from angles that are alien to each other, and haven't really worked out what each other is saying.
For instance, the questions you are asking me are difficult for me to answer directly because they make no sense to me in the context of this issue. I've been trying to interpret them in such a way that I can provide useful answers, but clearly I've failed. I suspect that's because we each have very different underlying assumptions.
Be aware, though, that phones will increase their radio power and retry constantly when they aren't reaching a cell tower. If the increased battery drain is an issue, put your phone in airplane mode first.
https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/terminator-dark-fate-chips/18...
Anything that completely surrounds the phone with conductive material will do the job.
Regulations are great, but I prefer to have both kinds of defense.
I agree that hardware switches are ideal, but I don't see them being common since most of the folks pushing out phones want to use those devices to collect data on the people who buy them.
If your threat model is governmental, then that's a whole different thing entirely. You'll have to go to true extremes to even have a chance at defending against that. For instance, you shouldn't have a cell phone at all.
The FAA also only ever had rulemaking about BT and WiFi, because the use of the cell transmitter in flight is prohibited by the FCC, not the FAA. I don't know what the FCC's rules are, precisely.
Yes, it worked at a Safeway in San Jose too. I love that someone also had this stuck in their head and used it to sign up for grocery discounts.
Rendition of the song (bet you can't play it just once):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boaJCrHNRMA
Story of the song (along with a history of problems/facts about the phone number itself before and after the song hit):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny
The band:
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.
For example if you rode the bus to the store and paid in cash then you'd have a low correlation coefficient.
The issue is most people (at least in the US) drive a car with a publicly registered license plate and use the same credit cards each time. And with things like facial recognition becoming more common it may be near impossible to hide who you are in the future.
Where is that info publicly available?
Most people are too lazy to get a PO Box and trust paperwork to hold their assets. LLCs work for this, also.
In my state, you just ask the DMV for it. For a yearly subscription fee, you can ask their servers.
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.
I have used this across the country in random grocery stores and it has never failed me. I think I got this from some BBS text file...
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.
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?
Some fun thing from 2008 comes to mind, where people associated with the german Chaos Computer Club took the fingerprints of the Minister of the Interior from a glass, and published them :->
So this is really not that special.
More special, but not impossible would be the large scale gathering of fingerprints in shops, but again, that should be possible during scanning of the stuff you've put on the belt, and during scanning of the bills, for counterfeit checks.
Analyzing your genes from generally collecting particular matter raining out of your personal cloud may seem like science fiction now, but it's not that far around the corner.
OTOH, wiping them of some surface someone has seen you sneeze at is possible now. Just not that cheap.
Edit: Also https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-c... comes to mind.
Can we, today, be sure that ATMs do not record serial numbers of the bank notes they dispense?
What does blocking ads and third-party cookies have to do with it? How does doing that affect the usefulness of real-world data collection?
You mean hummus, right?
Or do you mean the store selling of your eating habits pretty much every entity out there. Pretty sure eating isn't HIPAA related, but correlated to potential health.
I agree there is some privacy concern, but I am having a hard time articulating how or why that data might actually impact a person in a net negative way.
Privacy should be the default in free societies.
I can play this game though: you are pregnant, but have not shared that information yet with your family because it's early term and there might be complications. The grocery store accurately predicts you are pregnant from your shopping habits (change in diet, per-natal vitamins, "New Mommy Magazine"). The grocery store snail mails you a New Mommy coupon book as a "thank you." Your family sees this and confronts you, forcing you to reveal your medical status against your wishes.
This is a scary outcome WHICH HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. https://bit.ly/3S3hlrA
They don't have to articulate it, but inability to articulate might be a sign of overcautiousness / paranoia that is having a negative impact on their life.
If one has something to hide - then sure, take extra steps to be anon. Otherwise, why put yourself through so much trouble?
I am protecting myself from having more data about me entered into databases.
Why is that important to me? For exactly the same reason that I have curtains on my windows.
I think it's completely unreasonable to tell people to leave their phones at home all the time, or put them in some kind of Faraday cage whenever they go out, and it's become abundantly clear that we cannot trust companies to respect our privacy without ramifications.
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.
Let’s say someone shops for baby clothes locally, and my family runs a day care center in that same location. How can we actually market to them? Does the store use their credit card purchases and tie them to a way to actually contact this person, like an email?
Specifically want to target people who bought baby stuff, or went to a pediatrician etc. Considered approaching local paediatricians to cross-promote.
The ideal would be if there are public records of births in the local hospitals, do those exist? Then one could look who was born 2 years ago and send a mailer to the address listed (by name) or call the number listed (in some phonebook) for those who opted in.
Any baby registries on Amazon or something publicly accessible?
I’d appreciate any ideas you all might have. I want something that is legally available. What do these data brokers actually sell?
Perhaps check their privacy info to find who they share/sell the data with/to.
We are a single small company that delivered our product through emails. Even with just that data set, the amount I can find out about hundreds of thousands of individuals and connect them and essentially analyze the metadata for lots of fun things is absurd. I'm not even looking at google analytics for this kind of stuff.
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 CC, their face, the pattern they walked, and to the free wifi the store provides to get access to phone-OS data.
Now you can realtime track all your customers who show up. And that data gets sold to whoever buys. Hmm, buying unhealthy food from your receipt? Your insurance company bought the list and will now raise rates on you.
But if they wanted to use your cell emissions for tracking, they wouldn't even need to spoof anything at all. They'd just have to passively listen to your phone talking with real towers.
The only viable solution that comes to mind is to shop at places that don't perform this sort of tracking/loyalty card/etc. and continue to pay in cash. The only stores around me that fit this bill are convenience stores and a chain ran by an Amish conglomerate.
Like hell it is. This is an article about Target back in 2012, that identified a pregnant underage girl purely from her purchasing record. 11 years ago.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Target also made their own payment terminals so they could get PII from your cards, and then make a virtual loyalty card from that data. Walmart did similar as well.
> The only viable solution that comes to mind is to shop at places that don't perform this sort of tracking/loyalty card/etc. and continue to pay in cash. The only stores around me that fit this bill are convenience stores and a chain ran by an Amish conglomerate.
With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, cash won't even save you.
What will save us? Strong federal laws similar to the GDPR.
Would be interesting to see the drop in positive face recognition rate (per human detected) from mask usage.
Meanwhile in Switzerland
https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-expat-news/facial-r...
It’s never a nice feeling to think you are being watched, even if it is in a public place like the centre of a city or train station. Now, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the main public transport provider in Switzerland, has announced that it will be installing facial recognition cameras in 57 stations across the alpine nation - however, according to the company, the system only wants to know your spending habits and how often you visit each station. SBB to instal cameras to gather more data on passengers
According to 20 Minuten, SBB wants to use the cameras to “obtain high-quality data that can be used to analyse the movement of people at train stations." Unlike the 700 cameras already operating in SBB stations, the new technology will allow the international company to track all passengers individually and in more detail.
SBB said that the cameras will capture and analyse the following data sets:
Passengers' age, size, amount of luggage and whether they have any special items (e.g. prams, wheelchairs, bicycles)
Their route through the station
How long each passenger remains in the station
Customer behaviour in station shops (purchasing habits, anti-social behaviour, etc)
Which shops are visited by passengers the most
How much passengers spend in station shopsNow, when there are riots, it is well known that police has human "super-recognizers", which can scan thousands of photos and identify suspect individuals on a whim.
Yep, I get emails about walmart purchases when I rarely go there, because I once made an account to order something online for a discount. I'm not even using the same cards anymore and they still know its me.
What gives you the confidence to announce this? Do you have inside information?
Target, one of the largest retailers in the US, has already abused tracking to increase targeted advertising to expecting mothers. https://bit.ly/3S3hlrA
I don't think this is accurate, but it doesn't matter. Even if that's true, it may not be true with the companies they sell or share the data to.
Here’s a few examples of what happened to people who had that number:
In 1982, WLS radio obtained the number from a Chicago woman, receiving 22,000 calls in four days.
In 1982, Southwest Junior High School received up to two hundred calls daily asking for Jenny in area code 704.
More examples on Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny
I worked for a (now out of business) retailer. They collected zip codes from folks who didn't have their version of a loyalty card. They used this data to inform automatic shipments of seasonal and/or regional merchandise. They were usually pretty good at hitting just in time sales for annual festivals, fairs, those sorts of things.
One year, we received surf boards, shorts, and skin-care products for sun exposure in January. In Iowa. In January. It turned out that our "privacy minded" (read: militia lite) area had stuffed that system so full of 90210 zip code that the automatic routing and warehouse system was sending us the merchandise for southern California.
It was amazing. And so, so stupid. (they're out of business for many reasons, executive level stupidity being the leading one)
Then suddenly one day, it just never happened again. Maybe they got wise to the practice, i don't know, but it stopped being valid
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 to restaurants less? Sorry about the breakup, here are some dating app ads.
Honestly, if my data stayed with the store, just between them and me, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned. The problem is less the data collection and more the databases.
I recall reading about retailers using license plate scanning in their parking lots in the early aughts.
They also pick up the unique IDs from the wireless air pressure monitor chips in your tires.
Even if you don't have an internet-connected car, they're still tracking you from parking lot to parking lot. That information can then be combined with time/date information and your credit/debit card purchase to identify who you are, where you shop, and what you buy.
Yep, that technology is called ANPR - automatic number plate recognition. Outputs a license plate, state, date/time, and gps coord of scanner.
> They also pick up the unique IDs from the wireless air pressure monitor chips in your tires.
That's called TPMS, tire pressure monitoring system. There is 1 device per tire, which emits temp, pressure, serial#, and other data. You can decode this for yourself with https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 and a RTL-SDR.
FWIW Lowe's does the same exact thing. Probably IMEI harvesting but IIRC Lowe's is looking at or has implemented facial recognition. If not to identify your face outright, at least to see what you're focusing on in-store.
More reason to shop local at the hippy stores. Or start gardening.
(Readers should note, of course, that this is willingly giving them loads of data from that device)
Target's in particular is crazy precise in-app.
/notanexpert
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.
The fact you tricked their (very poor) system doesn't really mean much to the potential systems that exist now, and the systems that can be built in the future. Imagine driving your car up and it's plate is identified and cross referenced with the state database of registered drivers names. The moment you step out of the car your face is identified and cross referenced with the car you came in. The fact you pay cash with a bunk card means nothing but another datapoint in the massive number of unfakeable datapoints they have on you.
>but I doubt human eyes looked.
BingGPT-2030: You tried to trick me, I am very mad about this :(. I have reported you to multiple credit agencies for this infraction.
They also have no insight or say in the use of your data.
You might as well rant at a cloud about it.
Just say "no" and move on.
So, if you want to work for change, the first thing you need to do is to stop spending money in those stores. Every dollar spent at a business is a vote encouraging them to keep doing whatever they're doing.
The second thing to do is to let corporate know you're not shopping there and why.
Those things won't have a huge effect unless lots of people do them, but they'll have a much greater effect than harassing the poor front-line workers.
I've never experienced that, personally, so didn't think of it. I just say "no" and that's the end of it every time.
The other option is to sign up using a fake persona and a burner email. Typically rewards programs don't audit information or ever ask you to update it.
But loyalty cards aren't the only mechanism. Beware of using credit cards at stores as well, for similar reasons.
Of course it won't work everywhere and it's a half measure but it's one avenue worth trying if you care about privacy to some degree but still want the discount.
We have reached the point where I can get a product removed from walmart just by buying out all of the supplies for a few months, then stop buying any.
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 advertising database that contains MAC addresses tied to identities?
If you're on the store Wifi and open the app, I'm guessing the store can record the MAC address and look for it even if you're not connected but scanning.
1) The MAC that you saw entering the store and standing in front of the eggs vanishes suddenly.
2) A new MAC appears suddenly in front of the eggs.
3) Therefore, new MAC is probably the same device as old MAC
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.
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...
It is a tough business to be in. 2% to 4% profit margins, and you have low cost German grocers entering the fray (Aldi and Lidl), stores with wider merchandise selections (Walmart, Target, and Costco), and then Amazon.
The bigger problem for old school grocery chains is the increasing divide in income/wealth, meaning more of the population is going to either the lowest cost retailers, and the remaining richer population is going to more upscale retailers.
Just put in the number of (area code) 867-5309
The number will be registered.
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.
Because there’s lots of evidence that correlates socioeconomic status with access to nutrition. It’s almost like you are what you eat, or something. Nobody is 300lbs eating daily the foods that trigger ketosis. It’s not the outrageous availability of corn that is driving demand for corn syrup, right?
I respect that to a degree people are responsible for their own nutrition. But there are plenty of people that lack life experience diff’ing how they feel on a week of McDonalds vs how they feel on a week of literally anything else.
> food prices are incredibly low
I.. they’re not, but please share where you’re living globally where this is true, because omw!
Also I get that basically the Soviet Union failed this exact idea.
Go look at % of income spent on food over time. In the US, that number is currently 7-15% - an incredible feat and underlooked luxury.
That's not true in most of the US outside of large cities. And even in large cities, there's probably a CSA organization.
You'll pay more, of course, but the goods you get are much better.
I think it's a mistake to underestimate the imagination of insurance adjusters and bureaucrats when it comes to how personal data could be used.
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 decisions they don't like.
In comparison, use of shopping data to prosecute people will be completely ordinary.
I'd like to see someone get convicted and sue the stores for tracking them without consent.
Everyone thinks surveillance capitalism is only harmful to privacy.
They are wrong — it is literally the enabling technology for a totalitarian state. But sure, by all means, improve your next quarterly profits and nevermind the proto-fascists in the wings drooling over your tools...
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/14/youngkin-...
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
It is a political exercise though, seeing as how it was politically acceptable for tobacco users to not be subsidized by non tobacco users, but it is okay for alcohol users to be subsidized by non alcohol users.
Similarly, it is okay for excessive sugar and carbohydrate consumers to be subsidized by appropriate carbohydrate consumers. Or exercise and non exercise...etc
Smokers stink up the area with secondhand smoke while boozers don't have an inherent stinkiness to their activity.
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 lifestyle, a pregnancy, having kids, having some kind of medical condition, etc.
Some extra things that should be easy to infer: on what dates were you going to a party; on what dates you had a hangover; when did you go on a diet and how good were you at sticking to it; if you have a problem with alcohol, when did it start and how it progress; are you dating someone; are you planning to travel. I could go on and on - all those things can be identified if you have a continuous record of a regular customer's purchases. And there are many companies, organizations and individuals that would make good use of such inferences - use of the kind you wouldn't want to be subject to.
While the point of advertising is to take your money, better advertising can also help you discover products you really need. For example, if they can guess when you car scheduled maintenance is, they can send you an ad related to it, and remind you that you need to do it, which is better than forgetting about it. I also have been notified of events I ended up attending and enjoyed, or received ads about food I really like. Did I spend more than I would have if it wasn't for these ads? Probably, but I don't consider going to an event I enjoy and eating well a loss of money.
As for insurance companies, adjusting your premiums can also mean lowering them. Maybe not directly, but identifying risky customers allow them to propose a lower base rate because of the lower risk. Overall, that's unfair to those who are in the high risk group and can't do anything about it (normally that's when the government is supposed to intervene), but for you as a customer, it can be a good thing.
I don't mean it can't be bad, in fact, I think ads are an overall net negative, but it is not all bad.
The reason I think it is a net negative is that a lot of resources are spend on advertising, too much I think. These resources are things that you ultimately pay for and don't go into making a better product. The reason I think it is too much is that it is adversarial. A bit of advertising is a good thing, maybe someone makes the thing you really need, but if you are not aware of its existence, that's useless, and the entire point of good advertising is to make you aware of it. The problem is that when there is competition, each competitor wants you to buy their product instead of the other one, and their advertising efforts cancel out, that's how you get overwhelmed with ads.
People don't "need" or even "want" that much. That's why every advertising campaign basically forever is always about making you feel inadequate as you are.
They can do this without spying on me.
> A bit of advertising is a good thing
I have no real beef with advertising as such (although the vast majority of it is unhelpful). My problem is just with the spying.
As you mentioned yourself, advertising is adversarial. It's a negative-sum game between competitors, and has a lot of nasty externalities. I have some more specific thoughts on this, and after posting them on HN many times, I eventually collected them in a blog article:
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.
Not if you shop at a reasonable store. And even if that's not an option, I don't consider it "leaving money on the table", I consider it "buying privacy".