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Comment by andrewfromx

5 months ago

"Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account."

https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/2901187842...

There's that FSA/HSA benefit section at the bottom which explicitly states that Bilt receives item-level data:

https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens

17 comments

andrewfromx

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gruez  5 months ago

That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.

  • jkaplowitz  5 months ago

    In Germany, the major cross-merchant loyalty program Payback gives you one or two rounds of extra consent choices about the tracking, and the type we see here is absolutely not mandatory for participating. It does of course let them give you more personalized and useful coupons, but one can participate while declining that permission.

  • mistrial9  5 months ago

    > it's a loyalty program

    calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..

    • dietr1ch  5 months ago

      So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts,

      - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track.

      - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiated pricing is just getting their hands into everyone's pockets.The free market principles rely on perfect knowledge, and every step made to make pricing harder is an attack against self market regulation.

      Price discrimination is illegal even in Lobby-land, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13

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