Comment by juiceland
3 hours ago
What is the word “but” doing in this sentence?
> Privacy experts I spoke with said this level of detail may feel invasive, but it's fairly standard for how large companies in the US run their loyalty programs.
Something can be both invasive and standard. This practice is both.
I see a lot of "don't worry about privacy invasion X, because privacy invasion Y is unavoidable." when talking about this stuff. People are being trained to accept "normal" violations
In general, I agree with you and I'm a privacy advocate. In this particular case, though, it seems like we're railing against the idea that a retailer with repeat customers keeps track of what those customers are buying most frequently and how much they spend. It would be very surprising if retailers didn't retain that info, since it's data owned by the company, generated by the core business itself, and useful for forecasting. I'm having trouble understanding the "invasive" part.
I grew up in New York state, but my dad used to shop from a company called Cable Car Clothiers, based out of San Francisco, and he'd order everything by mail or over the phone. He probably shopped there for 20 years or more before I moved to San Francisco and I literally walked by that very shop on my way to work. He knew that my new job took me by their storefront and so he asked me to go in and pick something up for him. I had a short conversation with the shop owner who had a retail system that showed every order my dad had ever placed going all the way back to the late 80s. There is a bunch of derivative data that is available when you have a log like this, like the total amount ever spent, the most frequently purchased item, date of the most recent purchase, date of the oldest purchase, etc.
Is it the scale of McDonalds that's causing concern, or is it something else?
I was thinking this exact same thing. A mom-and-pop shopkeeper or diner owner knows this level of detail about all their regular customers, and did 50 years ago as well. They could predict "Steve always comes in about 3 times a week, orders eggs and toast in the mornings, and usually just gets a Coke when he visits in the afternoons" -likewise would know something might be wrong if your visits suddenly dropped in frequency.
People are concerned about the scale with this type of thing. I don't know how rational it is. It seems like people imagine themselves in a situation like Sandra Bullock in "The Net" where if an evil and very powerful entity wanted to cause you harm, boy what a detailed picture they could weave! With this, I both disagree with them (most of us are orders of magnitude less important than we'd need to be for someone to care to do that) and agree with them (it's probably bad if tracking is so good and pervasive that the few who have a good reason to be paranoid can't avoid having digital footprints of way too high fidelity to hide).
Or they're just worried the ads are too good and they know they're so weak-willed that they'll be manipulated into shopping too much.
It is the fact that the data are used to influence the behavior of customers.
There is a big step between “we observe the behavior of user segments and predict that the company will sell x units at this time and place” and “these individual users behavior is such that we can influence them to purchase what they otherwise might have not purchased if we perform the following actions.” That is behavior modification on a large scale.
If you’re interested in developing a more robust view of this topic, I highly recommend “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff and “We Have Been Harmonized” by Kai Strittmatter. They go into detail about what these systems are designed to achieve on a population scale.
‘… but contrary to what a regular person may think (that this level of data gathering is unusual), privacy experts know that it’s not, it is standard practice’
It means you don't need to worry, just trust the mega corporation to do what's best for you with this data!
"but" as a coordinating conjunction doesn't always literally mean an exception. Its definition is closer to "notwithstanding". The sentence is grammatically fine and does not imply what you are complaining it does.
Subtly normalizing the invasive data collection practice.
Or maybe not so subtly.
What level of detail is invasive here though? How often and which items a customer has ordered and their predictions on future customer behaviour based on that data?
I understand privacy concerns in many cases, especially when it comes to big tech and online privacy, or credit card companies, but this to me looks like a complete nothingburger.
> burger
I see what you did there
I agree, and when you boil it down, "keeping a log of what each customer orders, and doing math and statistics to guess what they'll do in the future"... that describes how every e-commerce operation functions, even going back 25 years. Of course there's a record of what you buy at the place you buy it from. The only reason there wasn't a long-term record like that in fast food in 1990 was that electronic storage was too expensive and paper storage just wouldn't be useful to do any later analysis on.