3 ms·

Even without reward programs, couldn't they just associate purchases with a given credit card or similar?

mooreds 3y ago
Absolutely. And I am sure they do. But rewards programs might make matching easier (across different credit cards and household members). They also are owned by the service provider and don't reveal anything to credit card companies. Again, I'm speculating here.
jmward01 3y ago
This has been my thinking too. When I make any purchase I am giving everything about myself away now. A long time ago I had the idea to create an 'accountability' e-mail server/credential generator that generated emails/credentials with unique ids along with a note about what it was used for so that you could see exactly who sold your info when you saw junk mail come in. There are now ways to do this but it is still a bit manual. It would be great to have this tied in with auto opt-out and auto reporting of abusers. Of course creating a personal e-mail server now is almost impossible.
- caddy 3y ago
  Not really, I rented a box from hetzner and have ran mail-in-a-box for over a year now. The IP I was assigned was on the microsoft shitlist for a little bit, but I sent them an email explaining why I was using the server and they took me off the list. Also took a few emails to GMail to get off their spam filter, but a few emails to family and asking them to report not spam (around 3 emails) was all it took. The only server I've ever been rejected by is a corporate email server with very strict settings, but every other corporate email has been fine.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
We don't actually care. We're interested in how the product is doing so we know how little we can get away with ordering (to the warehouse). I think the rewards are for sharing with other brands or stores that are owned by the same parent. I doubt they would sell to a competitor. That would directly reduce their own sales. Selling to another industry doesn't make sense either. No one wants more liability for retaining irrelevant data.
NegativeK 3y ago
They control the registers; they can identify or at least bin users by the selection and quantity of products they buy.
jethro_tell 3y ago
I that no you usually give convent as part of the sign up for the rewards program. They can track your cards and if they want to track those back to an address and match them all up, not a big deal, but they can sell it if you agree to their turns.

Absolutely. And I am sure they do. But rewards programs might make matching easier (across different credit cards and household members). They also are owned by the service provider and don't reveal anything to credit card companies. Again, I'm speculating here.

jmward01 3y ago

This has been my thinking too. When I make any purchase I am giving everything about myself away now. A long time ago I had the idea to create an 'accountability' e-mail server/credential generator that generated emails/credentials with unique ids along with a note about what it was used for so that you could see exactly who sold your info when you saw junk mail come in. There are now ways to do this but it is still a bit manual. It would be great to have this tied in with auto opt-out and auto reporting of abusers. Of course creating a personal e-mail server now is almost impossible.

caddy 3y ago
Not really, I rented a box from hetzner and have ran mail-in-a-box for over a year now. The IP I was assigned was on the microsoft shitlist for a little bit, but I sent them an email explaining why I was using the server and they took me off the list. Also took a few emails to GMail to get off their spam filter, but a few emails to family and asking them to report not spam (around 3 emails) was all it took. The only server I've ever been rejected by is a corporate email server with very strict settings, but every other corporate email has been fine.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

We don't actually care. We're interested in how the product is doing so we know how little we can get away with ordering (to the warehouse). I think the rewards are for sharing with other brands or stores that are owned by the same parent. I doubt they would sell to a competitor. That would directly reduce their own sales. Selling to another industry doesn't make sense either. No one wants more liability for retaining irrelevant data.

NegativeK 3y ago

They control the registers; they can identify or at least bin users by the selection and quantity of products they buy.

jethro_tell 3y ago

I that no you usually give convent as part of the sign up for the rewards program. They can track your cards and if they want to track those back to an address and match them all up, not a big deal, but they can sell it if you agree to their turns.