Interesting, as the article notes - if Capital One had terms and conditions that said, "we can use sales data for unrelated purposes", they would be able to trade on that information themselves. I wonder who else has information that they're willing to use/sell to third parties... Facebook? Google? I wonder how predictive e.g. the ratios of likes of McDonald's/Starbucks/Chipotle pages are. Or clicks on display ads for Puma/Adidas shoes.

> Surely lots of Wall Street firms -- Chipotle is followed by 31 analysts -- and asset managers are doing tons of research to try to estimate Chipotle's sales. They're visiting branches and calling investor relations and talking to pork suppliers and surveying consumers and generally getting paid a lot of money to build a robust estimate of how many burritos Chipotle is selling. One more piece of data -- one credit card company's charges at Chipotle -- would be helpful, but come on, not that helpful.

Could we get this data any other way? How about putting cameras in front of a few flagship Chipotle stores and using CV to track the number of people going in/out? That's legal, AFAIK.