[109569] in Cypherpunks
Safeway printing Club Card names on cash register receipts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Tue Mar 30 02:42:34 1999
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 21:45:33 -0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Safeway, Lucky, and other grocery store chains have club cards,
which get you discounts on selected items if you use them when you check out.
The privacy impacts of these are mixed - most of the early ones
wanted your Real Name, and were often used as a check cashing id as well.
More recently, they've been less concerned about your name,
since the real benefit is the amount of marketing information they get
on whether to put the beer next to the donuts or the disposable diapers,
and how much correlation there is between different kinds of products,
and what sort of coupon to print for you at the checkout line.
So you can get your card as "John Doe", and one activity common at
cypherpunks meetings has been to exchange grocery store club cards,
further obfuscating any evidence.
I bought stuff at Safeway the other night, and the checkout clerk gave
me my change and said
"thank you for shopping at safeway, Mr. ummm... Cypherpunik"
which surprised me a bit, but sure enough the receipt said the card
belonged to "J Random Cypherpunki". That wasn't one of mine -
I normally go for "John Doe, General Delivery, San Francisco CA 94101".
But they are watching.... :-)
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
