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"Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account." https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/29011

"Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account." https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/29011878427533-Neighborhood-Benefit-Pharmacy https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/2901187842... There's that FSA/HSA benefit section at the bottom which explicitly states that Bilt receives item-level data: https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens

gruez 2y ago
That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  > it's a loyalty program calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..
  - gruez 2y ago
    That's just the standard term for such programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program
    - uoaei 2y ago
      It's the normal term, in that it has been normalized as such. But it is otherwise not accurate except in the barest, most monetaristically self-fulfilling-prophecy way.
  - dietr1ch 2y ago
    So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts, - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track. - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiated pricing is just getting their hands into everyone's pockets.The free market principles rely on perfect knowledge, and every step made to make pricing harder is an attack against self market regulation. Price discrimination is illegal even in Lobby-land, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13
    - barrkel 2y ago
      Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold is more equalized.
      - jkaplowitz 2y ago
        There are ways to adequately approximate that kind of price discrimination without detailed tracking though, like giving discounts to students, seniors, and people receiving various kinds of welfare benefit upon showing proof of status. Yeah it isn’t as accurate as the privacy-invasive kind of tracking, since students and seniors can be wealthy and eligibility for welfare benefits doesn’t always consider assets or gifts from well-off family. But it’s accurate enough to give the economy most of the same benefit without the privacy downside. I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany.
        gruez 2y ago
        >I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany. Sounds like that'll push retailers to switch from a system where they give points/discounts to everyone, to one where points/discounts are "targeted", which of course requires opting into tracking. Like I said before, the whole premise of loyalty programs is that you're being tracked in exchange for rewards. You really can't expect to have your cake (discounts) and eat it too (not being tracked).
- jkaplowitz 2y ago
  In Germany, the major cross-merchant loyalty program Payback gives you one or two rounds of extra consent choices about the tracking, and the type we see here is absolutely not mandatory for participating. It does of course let them give you more personalized and useful coupons, but one can participate while declining that permission.

gruez 2y ago

That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.

mistrial9 2y ago
> it's a loyalty program calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..
- gruez 2y ago
  That's just the standard term for such programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program
  - uoaei 2y ago
    It's the normal term, in that it has been normalized as such. But it is otherwise not accurate except in the barest, most monetaristically self-fulfilling-prophecy way.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts, - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track. - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiated pricing is just getting their hands into everyone's pockets.The free market principles rely on perfect knowledge, and every step made to make pricing harder is an attack against self market regulation. Price discrimination is illegal even in Lobby-land, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13
  - barrkel 2y ago
    Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold is more equalized.
    - jkaplowitz 2y ago
      There are ways to adequately approximate that kind of price discrimination without detailed tracking though, like giving discounts to students, seniors, and people receiving various kinds of welfare benefit upon showing proof of status. Yeah it isn’t as accurate as the privacy-invasive kind of tracking, since students and seniors can be wealthy and eligibility for welfare benefits doesn’t always consider assets or gifts from well-off family. But it’s accurate enough to give the economy most of the same benefit without the privacy downside. I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany. Sounds like that'll push retailers to switch from a system where they give points/discounts to everyone, to one where points/discounts are "targeted", which of course requires opting into tracking. Like I said before, the whole premise of loyalty programs is that you're being tracked in exchange for rewards. You really can't expect to have your cake (discounts) and eat it too (not being tracked).
jkaplowitz 2y ago
In Germany, the major cross-merchant loyalty program Payback gives you one or two rounds of extra consent choices about the tracking, and the type we see here is absolutely not mandatory for participating. It does of course let them give you more personalized and useful coupons, but one can participate while declining that permission.