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What you buy at a grocery store can reveal a lot about you: - Personal care products: gender - Medications: age/health of you and family members - Magazines/

What you buy at a grocery store can reveal a lot about you: - Personal care products: gender - Medications: age/health of you and family members - Magazines/media: political affiliation, social class The list goes on. [Edit: formatting]

psychomugs 5y ago
This always reminds me of the anecdote of Target predicting pregnant customers and "outing" them before they or their family knows [1]. Really makes one consider using cash. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
- slg 5y ago
  >before they or their family knows To be clear, it is before their family knows and not before they know. It is extremely difficult to figure out someone is pregnant before they know. It doesn't take any complex analysis to see someone purchasing prenatal vitamins and conclude they are pregnant.
slg 5y ago
I guess this is an answer to the question but it doesn't answer the motivation behind the question. Why should we care about these things being public? You can tell my gender and rough age by looking at me for a second. If you want to keep those private your grocery store is the least of your concerns.
oramit 5y ago
Yes, you can infer a lot based on grocery store purchases. I don't deny it - but why does it matter? What bad things have happened to the average person based on grocery store purchase history? Again, i'm not trying to be flippant with my questions I'm honestly just frustrated after decades of following privacy discussions that there isn't a clear answer to this question.
- boatsie 5y ago
  I wonder this too, but perhaps your insurance company buys this data on you and says, oh, they drink sugary drinks and eat candy and chips. They are buying Tylenol and ibuprofen for chronic pain. Maybe they will get diabetes and we should raise their premiums accordingly.
  - oramit 5y ago
    I don't mean to rag on you in particular. The answers I get around privacy problems are always conjecture. "Perhaps" the insurance company will do x, "Maybe" they will do y. It's always some scary threat that could happen in the future. The problem is though that the powers that be (government/corporate) already have more private information than ever before and yet: nothing has happened. At what point do these warnings just become crying wolf?
    - kube-system 5y ago
      The data is already being used in various ways that people would object to, it's just that nobody who is using data in objectionable ways is announcing it from their rooftops, because they know it's objectionable and want to keep doing it.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Insurance companies DO buy data like this. It is not perhaps. They buy data about you that they do not use to your advantage. They have no interest in lowering your premiums and every interest in raising them. One other example is the 2016 election and cambridge analytica. Not going to make a political case on the politicians, but the political parties (and foreign govs with interest in the outcome) bought data on electors to try and persuade them to vote for one candidate or the other. Or to make them think issue X is bigger deal than they previously did. People don't like to lose autonomy in politics and data is good for targeting and persuasion. Of course, the big what-if is also worrisome. Maybe not to you, but to many. Some people are more concerned than others. If your of one minority religion, then you might worry if that religion gets targeted will gov buy data to identify individuals (eg china and Uyghurs or trump and his proposed list of muslums). Maybe your gay in a nation that isn't friendly to that. Its very easy to tell if someone is queer from mass collected data. That could be a concern if the gov starts looking for people. Another less scary but not great what-if: Many govs (including some us govs) are doing more "pro-active policing" where they try to prevent crimes, often with biased data. Right now its pretty targeted at going to minority neighborhoods, but maybe one day it'll target underage people who buy alcohol paraphernalia to see if they drink underage. Minor crime oft-committed, but probably easy to identify from only grocery store purchase data - especially if you combine that with camera data (walk in/out with someone who buys booze while they buy solo cups). While the under-age drinking is a silly example, it uses pretty easily available data. Think of all the minor crimes people knowingly commit that no one actually cares to enforce. Now imagine what we could do if a computer can just spit out a list of names. There are so many ways the data can be (ab)used and people come up with more every day.
Panqueca_do_mar 5y ago
- The amount of junk food that I buy: That I'm fat

psychomugs 5y ago

This always reminds me of the anecdote of Target predicting pregnant customers and "outing" them before they or their family knows [1]. Really makes one consider using cash. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

slg 5y ago
>before they or their family knows To be clear, it is before their family knows and not before they know. It is extremely difficult to figure out someone is pregnant before they know. It doesn't take any complex analysis to see someone purchasing prenatal vitamins and conclude they are pregnant.

slg 5y ago

I guess this is an answer to the question but it doesn't answer the motivation behind the question. Why should we care about these things being public? You can tell my gender and rough age by looking at me for a second. If you want to keep those private your grocery store is the least of your concerns.

oramit 5y ago

Yes, you can infer a lot based on grocery store purchases. I don't deny it - but why does it matter? What bad things have happened to the average person based on grocery store purchase history? Again, i'm not trying to be flippant with my questions I'm honestly just frustrated after decades of following privacy discussions that there isn't a clear answer to this question.

boatsie 5y ago
I wonder this too, but perhaps your insurance company buys this data on you and says, oh, they drink sugary drinks and eat candy and chips. They are buying Tylenol and ibuprofen for chronic pain. Maybe they will get diabetes and we should raise their premiums accordingly.
- oramit 5y ago
  I don't mean to rag on you in particular. The answers I get around privacy problems are always conjecture. "Perhaps" the insurance company will do x, "Maybe" they will do y. It's always some scary threat that could happen in the future. The problem is though that the powers that be (government/corporate) already have more private information than ever before and yet: nothing has happened. At what point do these warnings just become crying wolf?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    The data is already being used in various ways that people would object to, it's just that nobody who is using data in objectionable ways is announcing it from their rooftops, because they know it's objectionable and want to keep doing it.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Insurance companies DO buy data like this. It is not perhaps. They buy data about you that they do not use to your advantage. They have no interest in lowering your premiums and every interest in raising them. One other example is the 2016 election and cambridge analytica. Not going to make a political case on the politicians, but the political parties (and foreign govs with interest in the outcome) bought data on electors to try and persuade them to vote for one candidate or the other. Or to make them think issue X is bigger deal than they previously did. People don't like to lose autonomy in politics and data is good for targeting and persuasion. Of course, the big what-if is also worrisome. Maybe not to you, but to many. Some people are more concerned than others. If your of one minority religion, then you might worry if that religion gets targeted will gov buy data to identify individuals (eg china and Uyghurs or trump and his proposed list of muslums). Maybe your gay in a nation that isn't friendly to that. Its very easy to tell if someone is queer from mass collected data. That could be a concern if the gov starts looking for people. Another less scary but not great what-if: Many govs (including some us govs) are doing more "pro-active policing" where they try to prevent crimes, often with biased data. Right now its pretty targeted at going to minority neighborhoods, but maybe one day it'll target underage people who buy alcohol paraphernalia to see if they drink underage. Minor crime oft-committed, but probably easy to identify from only grocery store purchase data - especially if you combine that with camera data (walk in/out with someone who buys booze while they buy solo cups). While the under-age drinking is a silly example, it uses pretty easily available data. Think of all the minor crimes people knowingly commit that no one actually cares to enforce. Now imagine what we could do if a computer can just spit out a list of names. There are so many ways the data can be (ab)used and people come up with more every day.

Panqueca_do_mar 5y ago

- The amount of junk food that I buy: That I'm fat