Grocery store loyalty cards ask consumers to trade away extremely detailed personal information in return for the promise of savings — a promise that a few informal studies imply is inflated or even mythical. In this article, I want to focus on loyalty cards as part of a broader context: the profiling increasingly being introduced in grocery stores and other retailers. While there are certainly potential benefits to these technologies, I believe that the tradeoffs that you have to make for the convenience and claimed lower prices aren’t worth it.
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