A new law will ban retailers from using shoppers’ personal data to hike grocery prices—but consumer advocates warn it contains loopholes that companies could exploit.
A new law will ban retailers from using shoppers’ personal data to hike grocery prices—but consumer advocates warn it contains loopholes that companies could exploit.
Well, yes. But they’re doing this anyway. If you’re paying with a card (and most people do), they’re using your credit card number as an identifier to track you across all the purchases you made across all their stores. These days, they may also be using facial recognition for the same purpose, to even catch the people paying with cash. Making rewards program memberships and the like illegal would barely slow down their data collection at all.
It may not slow down the data collection much, other than perhaps people using different cards at different times, but if you aren’t in a loyalty program, the only place they could market specifically to you would be at the checkout.
Unless I guess they are upfront about facial recognition and have screens in store… which just sounds awful.