It’s cold and wintery. Time to hunker down with plenty of comfort food and a toddy or two… and while we’re at the store, let’s pick up a bottle of aspirin, some stomach acid medicine, and maybe even plenty of dog food for the rottweiler….
A swipe of both your store’s loyalty card (gotta get those discounts!) and of course, your debit card to pay for your goods — and home you go to lay in for the weekend, read a good book, and max out on all that junk food and alcohol.
Come Monday, your purchases, aligned with your identity, will be sold to a health insurer, or life insurance company, perhaps an auto insurance group…. and they will have that information to review should you contact them to make an insurance purchase.
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According to the Harvard Business Review, the source of the Fox News story, it’s a “fictional case study “. The supermarket doesn’t exist, The STORY doesn’t exist.
[Additional comment has been removed. Readers are welcome to provide arguments, discourse and ideas germane to the topic, but name calling and objectionable content will not be allowed and will be removed.]
Oh Sheila — you are SO missing the point!
Yes — the Harvard Business Review story starts with a fictional supermarket as an example because, God forbid, they should just choose ONE of the supermarkets (or any other company) that does this.
I promise you — I guarantee you — that if you are using one of these loyalty cards — all the information about you is being captured, translated, saved — it’s called data mining and it’s big business. The only question is which supermarkets (and other, similar programs at other kinds of stores, and/or the companies they subcontract with to get the information) are selling the information, and to whom it’s being sold.
If you think this isn’t happening, you are quite naive.
Trisha
The spys know more about the American citizen than that of China, or Russia..
This data mining is way out of line…thank you for writing this, I should have figured it out because of all the other insanity that is going on in this country…
I never put my pin# in any place with my debit card…I always say charge. If your pin# is in their system and it is transmitted for approval, someone can sit out side the store and pick up the signal with a hand held reciever, then they get your name cc number, and pin#. Then they call their partners in crime up in Canada, Russia or some other place outside the states and clean out your cash with the pin#..this has been happening alot..
I will not use my personal store cards anymore. I hate the idea of being spied on and then sold to the highest bidder to track me…
what do you think of giveing a false name, and address, and phone number and get their card, and just use it instead, and still get the discounts? I know they don’t check it out, if the info is true or not…
And let’s not forget about other types of cards where you can get money for your child’s college expenses, get points online to use for store gift cards, etc. I’m guilty of using those but I’m hoping to save some money for my daughter’s college years.
This info is true. Any type of loyalty or points card maintains that data not only for the reasons you say but so companies know what brands you use.
Trisha,
I’m not naive. I know my data is being collected and probably sold but I do not, for one second, believe that I would ever be denied insurance coverage based on my purchases. The courts would be innundated with lawsuits. The insurance companies would have no one to cover except little old ladies who buy frozen dinners and cat food and, trust me Trisha, those little old ladies are the people the insurance companies don’t want to cover.
Back to the point, the blog states “Come Monday, your purchases, aligned with your identity, will be sold to a health insurer, or life insurance company, perhaps an auto insurance group…. and they will have that information to review should you contact them to make an insurance purchase. This, according to the Harvard Review.”
The Harvard Review says nothing of the sort. They took a fictional story as a source, printed NOT ONE WORD of the story, and gave a different story, presented as FACT, based on the fictional story.
But I’m naive?
[This post has been removed. Readers are welcome to provide arguments, discourse and ideas germane to the topic, but name calling and objectionable content will not be allowed and will be removed.]