By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I’m not sure what the grocery shopping is like internationally, but here your data gets tracked if you use loyalty cards.  And loyalty cards get you special discounts with the grocer so many of us grudgingly use them.

After checking out, sometimes a small printer at the register prints out coupons that the computer inside thinks you will use.  Maybe the coupons are for a similar, competing, item to something you’ve purchased. Maybe it’s for some of the same products you’ve just bought, as a thank-you or to hook you to purchase more the next time you’re there.  And then there are puzzling coupons—like the one for an antacid that printed out for me on Saturday.  We don’t purchase antacids there. So…was the computer making a judgment regarding the spicy contents of my grocery cart?

This ties into something I’ve been reading a good deal about lately—data collection.  Although readers may be dismayed at the idea of any potential data collection by retailers or publishers, it’s definitely already happening.  Amazon makes recommendations based on our purchasing histories, for example.  If we haven’t unchecked various sharing mechanisms in our Kindles, whenever we highlight a passage, that is public, too.Continue reading