Re: got gmai?

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