We all have them...frequent buyers cards. In their most primal state, these simply consist of cardboard business cards that a company simply punches when one purchases a specific item (Sullivan's "buy six, get one free!" for instance). However, in their more complex state, frequent buyers cards can be used to track every last detail of your purchases.
We've all heard that Target knows you're pregnant before you do. And we all kind of get the creeps. While I love my rewards from shopping certain places, I don't feel relief knowing that companies are using my data to predict the next trends, to figure price points, and to track my buying habits.
However, a story with NBC news last week revealed that these frequent buyers cards can be used for something I never even dreamed of: saving people's lives. NBC news outlines the outbreak of e. coli infected spinach last fall. By using frequent buyers cards, investigators were able to track down shopping patterns from infected individuals to figure out what food was causing the illness. Further than that, investigators were able to tell exactly what spinach these individuals purchased, where the spinach came from, and could even track down who else had purchased that spinach to further prevent illness.
At an initial glance, I personally thought this was creepy. Investigators are able to tell that Joe Johnson and I both purchased the same spinach. While this seems like a trivial fact, the "big brother" fear in me was invoked. And then I thought, "how cool!?"
By tracking every purchase by individuals, investigators could track food outbreaks nation wide and would be able to prevent the death of numerous people every year. The possibilities of saving lives though are endless. Say a certain children's product is recalled for a safety hazard or because a toy includes lead paint. Would we not save a number of children by being able to track which individuals purchased the given item and contact them directly that the product has been found to be unsafe? However, on the flip side of that, people are not necessarily comfortable with every purchase being tracked by a computer that can recognize buying habits and further contact someone based on their purchase.
I pose the question on whether purchase tracking is worth it - to save hundreds if not thousands of lives every single year...to simply have purchases tracked?
I think you've struck on a big downside of robust privacy regulation. If the purchase data used for disease tracking here had never been collected in the first place, this disease wouldn't have been as easily tracked.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, I seriously doubt that retailers were thinking "Goodness, we should save data for disease tracking!" It's much more likely that this was an unanticipated use of the data. This suggests that collecting information, even if we don't know what exactly what we're going to do with it might still be a worthwhile endeavor and to the extent that privacy protection interferes with this process, that's at least potentially bad.
I understand how useful data-tracking through frequent purchase cards may save lives. However, I have two nagging concerns and a lot of questions.
ReplyDeleteOne, tracking consumer behavior is only useful when the threat has already been somewhat isolated. At some point, investigators had to figure out a rough geographic pattern or company, otherwise they would not have known which frequent buyer cards to search. Investigators still have a valuable role in isolating the threat before notification even comes into play. This is something that should not be forgotten; frequent buyer cards are not useful in the first stages of tracking an outbreak or threat.
Second, if the public or investigators lean too heavily on frequent buyer cards then is there a risk that certain subsets of people will not be notified? Would Cub Foods only alert their frequent buyers that there was a contamination, or would they release that contamination information to the press? Should companies be required to do both?
Do consumers lose out on physical protection if they refuse to enter into frequent buyer programs? Why are individual notifications more valuable than blanket notifications? Could companies face liability for not notifying all their customers individually?
I don't think that second concern is realistic. It's not in a company's best interest to only notify a certain subset of people in the event of an outbreak. The potential liability there would be like begging to be sued for negligence in my opinion.
DeleteAnd while the cards may not have been useful immediately, form the sounds of it they were useful quite early in the process. It's not as though narrowing it down to a "rough geographic pattern or company" has investigators anywhere near close to finding the source of the problem.
I rather like retail frequent buyer cards, because you almost never need to have one to shop at a store (the only exceptions I can immediately think of are warehouse clubs like Costco, Sam's Club, and suchlike). You can enroll in the frequent buyer program and receive discounts, or "buy 6 get 1 one free"-type offers-- or not. It's up to you.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the more data points investigators have, the more effectively they can pinpoint contamination sources; if too few people use a store's loyalty card, the store's data as a whole doesn't tell investigators very much. (This is especially true in light of the inherent limitations Cara identifies in the first point of her above comment.) So I just find this to be another interesting situation in which the relevant level of analysis is the community. If too few people waive a bit of their privacy, then the benefits do not accrue for anyone, including the waiving loyalty card enrollees.