Joshua Schmidlkofer wrote:
I am weary at the thought of explaining the way I think about this. Suffice it to say: Cliff's concerns are 100% correct. I think that he softens the concern too much. Safeway gives you a discount for letting them keep your info - so do Albertsons, and a couple other stores. In 1984 it was Big Brother, in 2004, it is greedy consumerism.
As with many things, the truth here is a bit counter-intuitive.
The "club card" method of data collection is the safest and most honest way to do something that is usually done more silently and dangerously. Safeway is *asking* you to opt in and *paying* you for your participation. If you don't want to play along, you don't have to.
Contrast that with how the exact same thing is done virtually everywhere else: indexing purchases by credit card number. This approach has obvious security implications, but that's still how most retailers do it. Any merchant gateway will echo back the customer name and CC# when you swipe a card at POS. That's not felt to be a loss of privacy b/c the same info is printed on the card itself... but being able to capture it makes data analysis a whole lot easier.
Safeway should be cheered for finding a less invasive and less risky way to aggregate information: by use of an internal ID that has little or no theft value. It's still the case that some scan data might be considered sensitive... pharmacy purchases, for example. But at least Safeway has the means (and, it would appear, *intention*) if collecting and analyzing de-identified data.
By way of contrast, you can't say as much for Fred Meyer, part of the second-largest retail chain in the country (Kroger). It's a fair bet Fred's is doing at least as much data collection, but such collection almost surely involves information that is more valuable and more specific to you personally: your name and/or credit card number.
In keeping with a general open-is-better philosophy, I'm far more comfortable with systems where the goals (and flaws) are obvious (club cards, GMail, national census) than those systems where goals and flaws are concealed and/or likely to change (credit bureaus, database resellers, hotmail, HMOs).
If I seem unconcerned about minor losses of privacy, it is because I have witnessed vastly larger losses first-hand. We have far less privacy to lose than many of us may realize.
FWIW,
Dylan _______________________________________________ PDXLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pdxlug.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxlug
