Doe's privacy really exist? In the Supermarket...

Privacy: Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...

The job of the investigator is to uncover the wrongs that are occurring by persons or organizations that use privacy as their cloak...

As a Private Investigator I am often ask how private is an individuals information? How private are the intimate details of your life? Who has access to my information? And the list goes on and on. Let me say first and foremost that this article is not meant to scare anybody or cause an uproars but information is being bought and sold every second, minute and hour of every single day. Not only are people profiting off of your information but they are sharing it and building complex systems that can track specific details and make assumptions that are verified in several ways.

The Discount Shopping Card: How many of you have those tags on your key chain for the supermarket, drug store, library, etc? Did you read the fine print when you signed up for the discount program? If you did read the fine print then good for you. If you did not read the fine print then I have news for you. The supermarket can tell many things about your lifestyle, financial information, family, medical conditions, etc just by the purchases made with these discount cards/programs. In the fine print you will read that the vendor reserves the right to use the data collected to market or supply you with coupons or to provide your information to third parties that you may be interested in. Some even goes as far as to state that the collected data may be sold without restriction to a third party. So think about this the next time you go to the supermarket. The information is being bought and sold to many businesses that are willing to pay for it. The savings gained are recovered by the entity by reselling your information.

Example of how your data may be used:
So Holly Homemaker goes to the supermarket and buys the following items:

• Baby Formula
• Wine (Bottle)
• Cosmo (Magazine)
• Salad
• Cigarettes
• Pepsi
• Dog Food
• Pad Lock

You may be asking yourself what is so special about this list. Knowing what information was purchased tells us a good deal of information on the individual. For instance we can probably guess that Holly owns a dog and has a child just by the dog food and formula purchase. The data collected would not immediately indicate such facts but if these same items are purchased regularly the confidence of the collected data would indicate that this is the case. In addition you could probably come to some conclusions about Holly by the fact that she purchased cigarettes as well. Cigarette purchases are typically pretty intimate meaning the person purchasing these items is normally the consumer. This is also true with Wine although Holly may be purchasing these items for somebody else that she is close to (such as a husband or close friend).

Knowing what types of products or services a subject is consuming tells the investigator a lot about the person and their habits and other personal details. Over time more and more specific information can be collected to show patterns and one time purchases to make the intelligent guesses on the actual details more and more accurate. Think about this the next time you think you are getting a deal with these discount programs. Do you want to sell your information for the amount of the savings?

One other thing that is common is for the store employees to scan their card if you forget yours. This has all kinds of implications to the data vendor and causes their results to be incorrect.

What you can do to prevent this type of data collection:
The simple answer is to avoid these programs. Many of these programs ask for your address and phone number and can cross reference the purchases by your home address. This brings about other concerns and possible uses for the data that question the value of the savings enjoyed by the consumer. The bad news is that if you have been a member of these programs for any length of time that there is already a good bit of information stored on your purchases and it is probably too late. Another tactic I like to call "fuzzing" is to use other peoples cards and allow others to use your cards or savings program often to change the information. For instance if you see somebody buying a gas grill and charcoal you then have no clue as to the type of grill that the person may own, the same goes for Pepsi vs. Coke vs. Dr. Pepper purchases (now the data vendor cannot show that pattern used to raise the confidence of the purchases).

Short of these suggestions you are pretty much on your own.

Our Recommendation: Forget the programs as they expose your data and are another form of collection, tracking and cross marketing.

About this article: The author of this article is providing this information as a public service to the community at large. If you have any questions or comments feel free to email the author at kevin(-at-)slcsecurity(=dot=)com.