Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store
To comply with California’s new data privacy law, companies that collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here’s an article about Ralphs, a California supermarket chain owned by Kroger:
…the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs “may collect” information such as “your level of education, type of employment, information about your health and information about insurance coverage you might carry.”
It says Ralphs may pry into “financial and payment information like your bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history.”
Wait, it gets even better.
Ralphs says it’s gathering “behavioral information” such as “your purchase and transaction histories” and “geolocation data,” which could mean the specific Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.
Ralphs also reserves the right to go after “information about what you do online” and says it will make “inferences” about your interests “based on analysis of other information we have collected.”
Other information? This can include files from “consumer research firms” —read: professional data brokers —and “public databases,” such as property records and bankruptcy filings.
The reaction from John Votava, a Ralphs spokesman:
“I can understand why it raises eyebrows,” he said. We may need to change the wording on the form.”
That’s the company’s solution. Don’t spy on people less, just change the wording so they don’t realize it.
More consumer protection laws will be required.
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Alejandro • January 29, 2020 8:02 AM
It’s bad when one Mega-IT corp spies on all of us, but now it’s getting down to the local grocery store targeting us like we are major criminals, terrorists and spies all in the name of corporate profit.
Congress has been bought off completely and will never provide any relief under the current system, Republican, Democrat or other.
A few states, like California, are trying. More effort is needed at the state and local level. For example, some cities are passing laws their own police department cannot track the citizenry with facial ID.
Which leads to the entire LE industry which is falling over itself to grab all the same data the corporations are sucking up, irregardless of any legal or Constitutional isses.
National LE policy: “We’ll do it until the Supreme Court says we can’t.”
Money is the grease that makes it all work so smoothly and secretively.
The biggest problem of all is the vast majority of people, many who should know better, simply don’t care about any of this because the internet is so fun, convenient and easy.
Even those who want change have very little horsepower behind their concerns, and indeed are easily written off as tin foil hatters. Like the cranks who hang out here.
What will it take to get people mad as hell about this? Willing to make demands? March in the streets?
I simply don’t know.
Footnote: And yes, Ralph’s will simply bury their surveillance machinery in obtuse legalese and carry on…like the rest.