Many supermarkets and shop offer their customers a loyalty scheme where they can accrue points through purchases and spend them either in store or on special de

Many supermarkets and shop offer their customers a loyalty scheme where they can accrue points through purchases and spend them either in store or on special deals the shop offers. The catch? The shop collects data on your habits. They already know your name, address, date of birth so they can determine whether you're single/part of a family/old/young. But the real value is matching up that profile of your life with your shopping habits, every transaction you make is tracked and collated to form an evolving picture of your relationship with the shop you're shopping at. This allows the retailer to target their advertisements to your needs accordingly and even gives a customer profile for people in the area so the shop can tailor the layout of the store to suit meet the needs of their demographic. In my personal opinion Facebook is the step up from the loyalty card. In exchange for 'free use' of the site, you're giving away crucial details about your life that can be packaged up and sold on to businesses. Data mining is essentially what facebook does, it's just they surround it with a wrapper that people find beneficial to their lives.