Standing Bear wrote:
If you don't think that businesses motivate their employees to spy on their customers, then why not take a drive to your nearest Kroger. They issue a card called a 'Kroger Plus' card to those foolish enough to apply for one that is the very soul of privacy invasion.
This kind of data collection has been going on since commerce began 4000 years ago. When I was growing up, the grocer, the pharmacist, the pediatrician (Dr. Davis) and the toy store owner (Mr. Sullivan) knew just about every family in the neighborhood. They knew our likes, dislikes, our habits, prejudices, and so on, in much more detail than any modern Kroger checkout clerk or headquarters data processing guy.
This was in Washington, DC, by the way. In small towns such as Emmitsburg, MD not only did the grocer to know everything about you, so did the teacher, the sheriff and all of your neighbors for miles around.
The computers at Kroger store a great deal of information about us, but this is mainly in the form of statistical tabulations. For example, the machines know that people of a given income level are prone to buy certain products such as sushi or whole wheat bread. They do not care about individuals, and the people who program these computers have no time to poke into your business.
This application becomes established your identity to their system. It contains just about enough personal information to make your identity easily stolen.
I doubt that! Kroger would liable for hundreds of millions in lawsuits if that were true. In any case, the way to avoid identity theft is to make personal information *more readily available*, not less. That way, any computer can check your bona fides against a certified central database.
People who hearken back to halcyon days when privacy was assured know nothing about the history of commerce. In 1850, for example, up-and-coming go-getters such as Abraham Lincoln earned a substantial amount of money on the side by reporting on the personal habits of every merchant, farmer and tradesmen in town to the credit agencies in New York, which later evolved into Dun & Bradstreet. They did not just report on credit worthiness (as they do nowadays), they reported people's religions, literacy, education, marital affairs, whether they went to church, how much they owed to friends, whether they owned or rented, whether they kept their houses neat and so on and so forth. There were no privacy laws and no expectation of privacy anywhere. The credit files were full of baseless rumors, innuendo and stories planted by competitors, and there was no legal recourse whatever to erase this. The only way to escape it was to change your name and move to another town.
In Kroger's case, they must be doing something with it.
What they do with it is common knowledge. You can read about it in detail in any trade magazine or book about the modern grocery industry and data processing. Mainly what they do is save billions of dollars a year in food that would otherwise be spoiled and thrown away. They save enough food to feed a Third World country. This is a good thing. The only drawback to this (besides the fact that it is a mild invasion of privacy) is that food banks receive much less overstocked food than they used to.
Every time one presents this card at a Kroger cash line, every item purchased is recorded in their database with something in your personal info as the 'key field' along with the date, time, and store location. Over time a detailed profile of your life, habits, and health, mental and physical, and occupation and vices, real and probable, can be drawn. And draw it they do.
But the computers don't know a tenth as much as Mr. Sullivan did, and they never gossip.
It makes me wonder just why they would pay so much for knowledge of our individual shopping habits.
The reasons are perfectly obvious to anyone who has worked in retail data processing.
People who say that modern computer technology is likely to lead to totalitarian government lack a sense of history. Three of the most notorious totalitarian governments in history were the Aztecs, the Tokugawa shogunate, and the Nazis. All three operated without modern technology. All three collected detailed information about their citizens and controlled people's personal lives to an extent that would be impossible in the modern world.
Also, it should be noted that computers work in both directions. We know more about the inner workings of our government and corporations than any country in history. Or if we do not know, it is our own fault because we can now find out.
- Jed
